The LPA ProWeb Server ( ProWeb) addresses the problems outlined above by putting the intelligence on the server's side of the connection rather than the client's bandwidth problems are, therefore, of little concern to the developer or the client and the application is always run in a known and controllable environment. This approach also makes applications available to a client that could not be run on their own machine.

ProWeb is a specialised extension to a Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP) server. ProWeb is written in Prolog and supports the development, testing and deployment of intelligent, dynamic server-based applications on intranets and the Internet. ProWeb basically provides a link between an HTML page displayed on your client's web browser and your application (developed in WIN-PROLOG and associated toolkits) running on your server. When a client views HTML pages in the traditional way, there is normally no intelligent interaction between the client and the server the client simply asks for the next HTML page via its Uniform Resource Locator (URL) and it is dutifully returned by the server. With ProWeb, your clients can effectively talk directly to your ProWeb-based application running on your server, using HTML pages as the means to pass back and forth the many interactions generated during such conversations.

The LPA ProWeb Server allows web sites to use the powerful reasoning capacity of WIN-PROLOG and associated toolkits completely in the background with HTML, Javascript, Java and other standard tools providing the user interface. Prolog is a very powerful technology, ideal for building intelligent solutions. The Web is saturated with information; low-level languages do not have the capacity to sift, sort and make sense of such a huge volume of data in a meaningful way. ProWeb brings the power of the industry-leading WIN-PROLOG to the Web, and so provides an ideal platform for building intelligent agents, smart search engines, diagnostic systems and data mining utilities. ProWeb hides the complexity of CGI programming and HTML forms from the developer; ProWeb automatically generates all the required HTML and CGI code needed for your application to run smoothly on the Web. By handling all the communication between the forms and the application logic, ProWeb relieves the developer of all the tiresome book-keeping. This provides an intuitive and robust way for developers to build "live", dynamic applications. The term "dynamic application" is not to be confused with the term "dynamic HTML", which is something completely different.

The features of ProWeb can be summarised as follows:

• - The next HTML page to be sent to your client can be intelligently selected.
• - Custom HTML pages can be generated on the fly depending upon answers submitted on previous pages.
• - Many clients may access your application simultaneously (limit being developer-defined), with each client being allowed a certain amount of time to complete their conversation (time being developer-defined).
• - The power of Prologs built-in backtracking can be harnessed to generate multiple solutions to a problem. - The entire control mechanism for your web site can be contained in only one file.
• - The asynchronous nature of the Web is hidden from the programmer.
• - Supports rapid prototyping of applications.