RE: How to present large datasets on the Web?

Buck,

You might want to give mrc, ltd. acall they have their mrc-productivity
tool and have recently broken out just the web generator component. It
will do what you want using JSPs, java, or RPG and HTML. You get to pick
which option.

Their website is www.mrc-productivity.com or their demo site is
www.crazybikes.com

Bob Cozzi


-----Original Message-----
From: web400-admin@midrange.com [mailto:web400-admin@midrange.com] On
Behalf Of Buck Calabro
Sent: Monday, December 02, 2002 4:40 PM
To: web400@midrange.com
Subject: [WEB400] How to present large datasets on the Web?


I am the RPG guy, not a Web guy and so my question needs to be viewed in
that light.

Our Web person is struggling with her adaptation to the iSeries.  We
have customers who have multi-million record database files and this is
apparently none too common in the Java/Web universe.  In particular,
we're looking at ways to present a telephone bill on the web.  Most
residential users' bills can fit on two or three printed pages, and
that's easy to do. What's harder is a commercial customer who might have
5,000 toll calls a month.  Or more.

We started by using the Java toolbox and direct program calls to RPG
programs to fetch the data.  Call the "customer summary" program and get
back the 20 or so data elements that make up the top of the bill.  Call
the "taxes" program and get back the dozen or so data elements that make
up the taxes section.  The ProgramCall class is nice because it has
connection pooling.

Then we get to long distance calls.  First, the direct program call
method has a 35 parameter limitation.  Second, it costs about .3 seconds
per call. Doing the math, it would take 25 minutes to call the "get a
toll record" program 5000 times.  Not a bargain.  By blocking the call
records up (that is, stuffing as many records as we can into a 64kb
parameter) we can reduce the number of calls considerably.  This does
not seem terribly promising from a maintenance standpoint.  Ultimately,
there's a limit.  We're prototyping a JDBC solution now, but data queues
have been bandied about too.

So.  Has anyone tried to routinely display a list that contains five or
ten thousand entries on the web?  What architectural approach did you
take?
  --buck
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