Despite being primarily an SOA/ESB middleware and backend server, Zato does allow one to produce any content that can be transported over any of the procotols supported, including HTML through HTTP.

The ability to output HTML comes in particularly handy when there’s a need to create a quick dashboard for a Zato solution yet running another deamon to serve HTML is not practical.

In that case, you can easily make use of the HTMLService that has just been uploaded to zato-labs.

The service exposes one method generate_payload which expectes you to provide a set of business data and a Django template to render the data in.

Here’s a sample client service using the base one to output a list of customers …

{% gist 7185428 %}

… and here’s the result after hot-deploying it on a cluster and exposing it through a channel:

Naturally, there’s nothing preventing you with serving or linking to Twitter Bootstrap, jQuery or any other tool to make the result as attractive as possible.