Re: HTML and PDF Reports

I'm with Nathan on this one. It could be done fairly easily. Finding the
time is the problem.

I'm swamped right now otherwise I'd pound it out tonight over a few beers.
I've put together quite a few nice systems, although decided against AJAX
for most of them. I am using it in one application now I'm writing for a
county clerk's office. I showed it to Aaron. While simple, it does work
nice as far as making it more "user friendly" and the hardest part was
putting together (actually finding online!) an AJAX library to plug in so I
could make multiple connections at once. That took all of 10 minutes.
Implementing it took all of 30.

The problem is, right now it's only internal. It's one case in all the
projects I've done where I thought AJAX fit perfectly.

I know, Joe. Another "copout" answer. Some of us these days want to spend
more time with our families and sleep instead of pounding out proof of
concept code. :) (yes, there is a smiley there!) Now, if you pay me for
the time, I'd be happy to do it. :)

Bradley V. Stone
BVSTools - www.bvstools.com
eRPG SDK - www.erpgsdk.com

-----Original Message-----
From: web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx]On
Behalf Of Joe Pluta
Sent: Tuesday, May 20, 2008 11:04 AM
To: Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: Re: [WEB400] HTML and PDF Reports


Nathan Andelin wrote:

Joe Pluta wrote:
That's why I'd like to see the CGI equivalent of the scheduling
application.

You and Chris Laffra did a good job with your scheduling

application and

I was sorely tempted to step up to your challenge to duplicate it, but
it wouldn't be good for me to temporarily sideline my own development
plans. If a client asked, I'd probably budget 100 hours for it.

Not to be too mean, Nathan, but that's not much of an answer. Of
course, I expect it to be the best answer we're going to see, because
nobody is going to do it. And that's the whole point. Everybody is
willing to say how easy their approach is, nobody is willing to actually
do it.

And to say "I'd probably budget 100 hours" is roughly equivalent to
asking us to trust you. Not that you're lying, but my guess is that you
underestimate the work involved to add all the features this little
application has, as well as getting it to perform as well as this one
does. Your template approach in particular is likely to lead to high
bandwidth and correspondingly lower performance.

I have already taken the time put put together a basic AJAX library, so
handling asynchronous requests and responses to update pages is no
longer a strech for me.

My approach would be to use Dreamweaver to layout HTML

templates and use

a little bit of JavaScript to toggle between them, so that the client
could play with and approve a prototype of the application without any
connection to the server.

Until we see something actually working, I'm very leery of a template
approach, especially to something like a realtime chat window. Those
NEVER work very well with standard HTML. You'd definitely have to spend
some serious time getting the AJAX part of that correct.

I'm sorry I can't spend the time on it. I think it would be a good
learning experience if folks were able to monitor my approach

to putting

it together, but the following link will show a scaled-back technique
for toggling back and forth between HTML templates, which could be
extended to be an interesting prototype.

http://www.radile.com/rdweb/apps/rsdc/iphone.html

Thanks for the input, Nathan. But frankly if you can't find the time
even to prototype a couple of the actual business features, then I find
it unlikely that anybody will. But that's what really makes EGL so much
fun - we started with the basics (listing sessions) and it was so
productive that we were able to add a half-dozen other features in the
limited time we had available.

Joe

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