The HTML DataWindow is a thin-client DataWindow implementation for web applications that provides most of the data manipulation, presentation, and scripting capabilities of the PowerBuilder DataWindow without requiring any PowerBuilder DLLs on the client.

The HTML DataWindow is a cooperation between a server component and an application (or page) server. The server component translates a DataWindow definition and data into HTML. The application server has server-side scripts that create a web page that includes the generated HTML. The server-side scripts pass client actions back to the component, which modifies the HTML according to the user's request (such as scrolling to another page of data).