Re: How to present large datasets on the Web?

At 10:59 AM 12/3/02, you wrote:

> From: "Evan Harris" <spanner@ihug.co.nz>
> Yes you can write a custom socket routine, but why would
> or should you if there is a standard, agreed way to do this
> over the wire (unless we are talking totally in-house).

This struck a chord with me.  It surprises me to hear about people writing
their own iSeries socket servers rather than simply connecting their
applications to the standard socket server that comes with the box.  Even
for "totally in-house" applications, just configure the HTTP server to use
your port of choice.

Ugh.  Many of my customers do not have the http server configured, nor do
they want to.  We've been writing interfaces for customers using TCP
sockets for a number of years.  Some of the early ones were store and
forward interfaces over FTP.  Those that needed better response times were
written as custom socket interfaces.

As far as the problem with large formatted output is concerned, I like the
idea of having the servlet or CGI program submit a batch job to process the
request.  The batch program may incorporate any existing RPG logic, but
generate HTML or whatever the desired format is, store it on the IFS, then
respond to the original customer with an email message indicating the
location of the file to download.

I definitely agree.  Generally, if the output is large, I find that HTML is
only a mediocre choice for the output format.  It's too painful to
parse.   I would much rather have a 'data' format, either delimited, fixed
width, or XML.