Pajes and Skinning

Skinning in Pajes means the ability for an application or website to dynamically alter its look and behaviour - slip out of one skin and into another.

Pajes is not intended to allow skinning across devices. The same interface can't be created for a web browser and used by a WAP phone for instance. But short of that Pajes can do pretty much anything in an HTML context.

Importantly Pajes allows multiple simultaneously active skins and dynamic alteration of skins - no recompile, no regeneration, no restart of the web or application server.

Pajes Skinning Capability

A Pajes application does not contain the look of a browser page it presents. It is abstracted into standard HTML/javascript files which are read, templated and used as required. This process is dynamic. If you alter these HTML "skins" Pajes detects it and loads the revised skin and presents it the next time that paje is to be viewed.

This means the application look can be changed "on the fly" and the change can be made by a non-technical person without restarting the webserver or going through any regeneration or recompile. Retail sites spend months switching to a fresh "look" with lots of expensive recoding and retesting. Skinning makes this kind of site update a snap.

Maybe more importantly, multiple "skins" can be active at any time. The same application or website can be made to look and behave differently for different users or at different times. The uses for this are many from tailoring look and feel for multiple clients from a single implementation to simultaneously serving international users with differing local languages.

The variations in the skins can be anything that a static page can contain, including variations to colors, fonts, layout, logos, images, language, javascript/vbscript and elements of DHTML.