In all respect for expertise and dedication, both Scott's and the
CGIDEV2 methods are potential faulty.
They both build on the assumption that users don't put special markup
characters in their database, if they do, both method's will fail.
Frankly, I have been working with, at start, EDIfact, then HTML, XML and
JSON for 25 years and has been in national as well as european
standardization boards as well as that I have been part in our national
goverments XML project - and the first thing to test is NOT "Hello World"
- it's putting the forbidden characters and any special country specific
character into the test dataset - and why - because it catches any layzy
programmers that believe that they, and not their users, has the right to
descide what characters to put in their databases and it saves hours of
headache in a later state tracing unpredictable errors, not speaking of
a complete system halt.
Systems that dosn't make correct encoding to specs is not approved -
period!
And methods that works 99,99% isn't just good enough - if you have a
million transactions/interactions in a year - you still have to waste
time, analyze and solve a problem every third day because the method
will fail or maybe 100 times in a single day.
It is wrong that there isn't a tool there can build well structured
and encoded XML, JSON or HTML in RPGLE and that will work as "stand alone"
to create files in the IFS, with Scott's HTTPAPI for webservices and/or
with
CGIDEV2 for WEB.
It's an API that builds upon and extends CGIDEV2. Originally I called it
powerEXT Light, but during the comming weekend there will be a new version
called "powerEXT Core" and this part of powerEXT will be LGPL licensed.
The API has NODE support for XML, HTML and JSON and this support has the
following features:
1. RPGLE inline coding, no need for templates
2. Keeps track of the hiracical structure
3. Inserts correct tabulation an LFCR for readability
4. Attributes can be build and passed dynamically
5. Encodes strings correctly
6. Can output to IFS in UTF-8
7. No redundance in specifying tags/endtags
8. Has been tested by LEAN experts to be very efficient in terms of
coding time because it does the whole job in one line pr. node
The API and Methods (subprocedures) are documented here with examples ...
http://www.powerext.com/pextdoc_CGI.htm
If anybody wants to download it, please wait to after the comming weekend,
powerEXT Light will be replaced by powerEXT Core and will in the same time
require V5R4.
And this is not an untested API, powerEXT Core is the Core API to
support powerEXT Application Framework (1), the only RPGLE Open Source
and GPL Licensed framework to dynamically support/build RIA's(2) on
the iSeries.
(1) An Application Framework is not a tool, it covers the whole devolpment
and life circle in any areas of system development. From the first
definition
of data entities to the development of programs, to the change management
and
even, if cleverly build, changes to adobt new techology hypes.
(2) A RIA (Rich Internet Application) is in comparison with a WEB 2.0
page, a application running entirely in the browser that only interacts
with the server through callback interactions with the server requesting
or transfering data. A RIA is build on OOjavascript, the only language
that can run cross browser without plugins. Typical RIA apps. is Google
Gmail, Office and Wave.
Best regards
Henrik
midrange.com
