A Generator template has placeholders for text, graphics, and sound. Generator can dynamically fill the placeholders with content from a data source to create a Flash Player movie or a GIF, animated GIF, JPEG, or PNG file. The data can be sport scores, stock quotes, news headlines, images, values for charts, and so on. The data source can be a text file, text output returned by an HTTP or FTP request, a result set from a Structured Query Language (SQL) query, or a user-created Java class.
Generator can process a template in two ways: online or offline. Online processing is done as an extension to your Web server and occurs when a client browser requests the template file. Offline processing is done with a command-line version of Generator.
Online processing is best suited for Web sites where graphics need to be customized for each visitor to the Web site. Offline processing is best suited for Web sites where the data source changes infrequently.