Re: IceBreak as an alternative to Apache?

There is nothing particularly special about stateful connections. In traditional CGI processing this is known as persistent CGI, and has been around since about 1998. Not only that, it's a built-in capability of the IBM i that has been around for nearly as long on the IBM Apache server. As far as I know, it goes back to V5R1 or V5R2, maybe further. That's a decade or so. And with IBM, you control it by session, not by server, so you can have persistent or non-persistent sessions on the same server.

Also, this is a fundamental capability of WebSphere. Via the Java toolkit you can have both persistent and non-persistent connections and in fact, if you needed to you could have both persistent and non-persistent connections in the same session! EGL supports this capability out of the box; when you define a program (RPG, COBOL, whatever) to be called you define whether it is stateful or stateless. So you can have both stateful and stateless connections in the same session! Stateful connections each have a persistent job, with overrides and ODPs and a QTEMP - the job is named QZRCSRVS and runs in QUSRWRK.

So, it's nice that IceBreak has this, but it's really not unique to the tool.

Happy New Year!

Joe

P.S. For debugging, you might want to look into Service Entry Points. It makes debugging web programs a breeze, even in non-persistent CGI!

Hi Kevin

"task switch feature"! This feature is a feature which is special in IceBreak. It is a feature that keeps track of your browser session and sends request on to an isolated job native under OS/400. This means that your programs can remain open with file pointers, variables etc. It also means that you might use the QTEMP to something practical - again. Further, you can work with the job through normal OS/400 interface such as WRKACTJOB. It also means that with this technique can debug programs without having to think about other jobs and sessions.