RE: What About Price vs. Performance?

Brad, I have to say you've done QUITE an excellent job.  My sincere apologies.  
You have evidently taken to heart much of what we've talked about, and added 
lots of your own initiative to boot.

I'm a bit humbled.  One quick question, and please, this is NOT a criticism, 
I'm only asking because I'm quite amazed at what you've accomplished.  It looks 
to me like this is an inquiry only; do you have support for actually updating 
records?  See, that's the focus of my stuff, is to provide that ability to 
ENTER data into the system.  Perhaps that's why you and I clash so often; I 
didn't understand the gist of your application.

Regardless, you've done a great job, in my estimation.  Good luck and continued 
success with your product!

Joe


---------- Original Message ----------------------------------
From: "Stone, Brad V (TC)" <bvstone@taylorcorp.com>
Reply-To: MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com
Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 11:54:35 -0500 

>> Brad, do you support multiple-page maintenance?  That is, 
> where you go from one page to the next, maintaining different 
> fields on each page?  With the ability to page back and 
> forth?  If you can do that, I'm impressed.  That's my design 
> - multi-page transaction input.  Any fields from the message 
> can be moved from one page to the other.

Yep.  Each page is set up as an "application" so that each one can have
different layouts of fields, etc.. etc...  For example, a field on an
invoice list can be a hyperlink to a detail view.  But that invoice
shouldn't be a hyperlink on the detail view.  Because these are each their
own application, it won't show up as a hyperlink unless they want it too.

I also have tracking down to the application level.  The logs don't tell me
enough, so I store my own data as well as log.  That why I know down to the
user level how many hits I get.  I can say "Mary, you've viewed your invoice
detail page 19 times between 10am and 1pm. Whats up?  Is there a problem?"

Initial design took about 1 month.  It was up and running after a couple
weeks after that.  Now, I constantly updating and tweaking it.  ILE made it
very easy to do this.  Also, each company that uses this application can
custom design the look and feel of their web page.  Down to fonts, colors,
backgrounds, borders, and individual table cells.

> 
> Your field translation is nice; I already do all that, again 
> defined by a single record in a table, and I don't use any 
> JavaScript.

Javascript is merely an added benifit to the page.  Has nothing to do with
the real design of the application.  I chose to use it because I do believe
it saves CPU cycles for those that have Js turned on.  I always validate on
both the client and the server when possible.

>  I don't have the search capabilities; again, I 
> don't use JavaScript, so I applaud your design. 

Search has nothing to do with Javascript.  If a field is set as searchable,
and it's translated, then it creates Javascript on the fly to do client
validation.  That's it.  That's all the JS does.  JS doesn't do any
searching, etc.

> You, on the other hand, have done a good job at creating an 
> RPG version of Microsoft Access.  It's nice, but does it 
> actually do business?  I don't know, Brad.  But all this is 
> still just spittin' in the wind, and I'm off to get married 
> and then off to Maui...

I thought it was more like Cold Fusion, since it is a web app.  

Yes, it does a LOT of business (I don't get why you'd even question that).
It's used by thousands of our customers to check status of their orders.  It
took over for an NT server running SQL DB and Cold Fusion.  It couldn't
handle the hits or the data.  And the replication was a nightmare.  When I
ask companies how it's going, they say "Well, we aren't getting phone calls,
so that means it's working."

Enjoy your wedding.

Brad  

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