OpenPages™ maintains "state" by generating a unique "session" for each visitor to the Web site. The session information is stored on the Web server - not on the user's hard drive. This feature allows the programmer to write applications that "know" something about the user, e.g., what the user did in another section of the site or the last time he or she visited, and to customize the Web pages on the fly based on a user's profile or previous actions. OpenPages state maintenance does not depend upon a Web browser's support for cookies. The OpenPages system makes it possible for the programmer to automatically track and record user statistics at the site. Statistics are recorded not just at the page or file level but at very fine levels of detail, such as at the level of individual product characteristics in the case of an online catalog.

Database connectivity is tightly woven into OpenPages. Rather than relying on a separate database interpreter, programmers can directly access database files from the code in their HTML source files. This results in dramatic increases in database performance on the Internet. OpenPages uses native UNIX database files and our proprietary search architecture to achieve a high-performance, low cost database solution. The OpenPages database solution has been designed specifically to operate over the Web, freeing it from the limitations of general-purpose database programs.

Accessing multi-media components, system resources or other applications is very easy because of OpenPages' component architecture. The system automatically generates Web pages by sourcing multiple media components, and allows any program or system command to be executed directly from an HTML file.

OpenPages uses a high-level interpreted scripting language as the "glue" code in the HTML files. In addition, the system hides the "ugly" details of CGI programming, requiring much less code to be developed when creating enhanced features. This makes OpenPages ideal for rapid application development and provides a logical framework upon which to build Java-based features.

The script language supported in the current version of OpenPages is Tcl, an industry-standard language that is widely supported by universities, user groups, independent authors, and, in particular, Sun Microsystems.