Re: Thinking out loud about a new RPG web framework

Joe Pluta skrev den 06-06-2008 16:51:

Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen wrote:

Naturally. I was expecting that we were looking at writing new stuff here, instead of gluing a webfront end on code not written to be web callable.

You're getting nasty. Browser-based applications can be stateful or stateless. To denigrate stateful applications as being "glued on" is a slashdot attitude, not a productive comment.

I am not getting nasty. My apologies if you are offended - ascribe it to cultural differences from a non-native speaker.

My experience is basically that if you try to tweak an interactive program into a web version SOMETHING will have to give which is plainly not available.

I was designing a web interface where the experienced AS/400 person who requested it, was expecting that a drop-down box was populated with values after filling out a text box. This was before Ajax so it was not possible without a full page refresh.

Here's a simple example. The user requests an ad hoc query over a database with millions of records. (This is truly an ad hoc query - no index or view exists to satisfy the request.) They want the first 20 records of the set, and then page through 20 at a time.

How do you write this application?

Since JDBC 3.0 allows for moving both back and forth in a resultset (this is from memory, so the names may be different) I would use plain SQL over JDBC and put the resultset in the session bean along with a counter stating the current row number so paging is possible. It should be trivially simple, but I'll need to do a quick and dirty test to see if it actually is so :)

This is the type of thing that happens all the time, and it's the reason why business applications need stateful connections. The idea that all things must be stateless is just another myth that needs to go away.

One of the really big problems is when you have multiple places where data must be handled, and there are just tiny tubes between them. The Java world versus the Native world on the AS/400 for instance.

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Thorbjørn