Web enablement options (previously private)

All,

Nathan and I have traded a couple off-list e-mails concerning web enablement
options based on the shoot-out on his site mentioned in a prior midrange-l
post. With his prior permission I'm bringing this thread back to midrange-l
since we think it may be of interest to other midrange-l'ers.

Nathan,

I'm not very familiar with Net.Data so I can't comment on the comparison,
but AFAIK there is no "cache" per-se in IIS so ASP pages would always be
read into memory. Of course, there is the underlying disk cache so it's
actually unlikely that you'd have a physical read if it was a frequently
accessed page.

As far as what I use ASP for, that depends on your point of view. I could
either say "quite a bit" or "as little as possible." Let me explain... I
have no problem reading data from tables on the AS/400 in ASP via ADO and
SQL statements (select xxx from yyy where zzz) However, I draw the line at
any serious business logic or any updates (add/change/delete) of any kind.
In all those cases we call stored procedures on the AS/400 that are actually
just RPG programs. These stored procedures are called from the ASP.

My ASP programmers are responsible for simple select queries and more
importantly, making the site look pretty. They needn't concern themselves
with the details of the business logic or the cross-file updates necessary
to allocate a rubber-widget from inventory in warehouse 1 for order 2. On
the flip side, my AS/400 programmers must concern themselves with these
business-critical operations, but they could care less if the customer name
was in red or green, bold or underlined, in Arial or Times New Roman. All
those decisions are important, but not to the AS/400 programmer. There is a
severe line between programmers and web designers and it's rare that someone
can cross over that line.

-Walden

------------
Walden H Leverich III
President
Tech Software
(516)627-3800 x11
WaldenL@TechSoftInc.com
http://www.TechSoftInc.com



-----Original Message-----
From: Nathan M. Andelin [mailto:nandelin@relational-data.com]
Sent: Friday, December 28, 2001 15:59
To: Walden H. Leverich
Subject: Re: OS/400 *SAVF - Boats For Sale Table


From: "Walden H. Leverich" <WaldenL@TechSoftInc.com>
> As far as your questions go I've attached the only code involved (it's
> all ASP, nothing on the AS/400).

Walden,

There's a striking similarity between your ASP file, and the 1st version of
my Net.Data macro.  It used SQL to populate a result set.  I later changed
it to call an RPG program for performance reasons.  It was an attempt to
make the Net.Data version look as good as possible.

For simple requests like a report, a scripting solution (like Net.Data and
ASP) is ideal.  In contrast, my Relational-Web product is designed for
robust, highly-interactive applications.  Applications with significant
scope.

I've never worked with ASP, but the performance of Net.Data degrades
terribly when macros are not in cache.  Net.Data's internal cache is
limited.  In complex applications macros get swapped in and out memory
regularly.  CPU utilization goes up dramatically.  Response time suffers.

What do you use ASP for?

Thanks,

Nathan M. Andelin
www.relational-data.com