Hi:
You are describing the kind of processing done by the SAS/IntrNet product (where a user can click on a URL and dynamically execute a SAS program) or by the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform, where a stored process (a SAS program) can be executed on a server machine by clicking on a URL.
There are other ways to submit batch programs -- using a .BAT file or a .CMD file or running them from a script -- but no matter how you do it, somewhere, on some SAS server, the SAS.EXE program must start up and run. Using a batch program allows you to start up and run SAS during non-peak hours; using other, more advanced techniques allow you to execute a SAS program dynamically or "on demand". Either way, SAS is starting up, the question is how, and when.
If it would be OK for your web page to point to an HTML file that was created nightly, you could create a batch job to run overnight that would update the HTML report file. Then when your users clicked on the web site link, they would call up the most recently created HTML file. In that instance, SAS would not need to be active, because the users would just be accessing a file that was created for them in a nightly batch run.
You might look at the SAS Companion documentation for your operating system to see how to do batch submissions on your platform. Or you could look at some of these papers which describe other users' approaches to "web enablement" -- both with and without SAS/IntrNet or the Enterprise Intelligence Platform:
http://www2.sas.com/proceedings/sugi28/127-28.pdf
http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/proceedings09/031-2009.pdf
http://www2.sas.com/proceedings/forum2008/012-2008.pdf
Web enablement is the general term for what you're asking about. Web enablement can be as simple as building a directory of HTML files created by SAS and keeping them on a web server machine where they are accessible or as complex as using components like SAS/IntrNet or the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform to execute programs "on demand".
cynthia
