The Charlotte Web Database Engine is a development tool and middleware program that is designed to aid in the rapid development of web-based database applications. Charlotte communicates between a web server and a third party database engine. Developers create normal HTML pages with special Charlotte-specific tags (fully conforming to HTML syntax). Charlotte then uses these tags to place dynamic content from the database engine. In addition, Charlotte aids developers by supporting nested SQL statements, local and global variables, information exchange between pages, error messaging, and an API (Objective C, C, C++, Java, PERL) enabling further extensibility through external scripts and programs. The cross-platform and cross-database architecture of Charlotte does not tie developers into a single platform or tool vendor, and allows for easy migration of web sites between different platforms. Unlike other approaches used in web-database engines, Charlotte also ensures easier code maintainability by centralizing the code in one place.