Re: Reading data

Darn. I am still not making my case. I wish I communicated better. Please let me try again.

Most of the RPG programmers I know, including me, have made web pages, can use Photoshop, maybe use Google Checkout, and have passing familiarity of the Internet. All of that is needed, but it is outside the scope of what I want to do with this project.

I want to read/edit/delete data from a physical file in my library on an i, and do that on a web page, and do it with the basic tools, including RDi, provided by IBM. All at somewhere close to the "Hello world" level.





On 1/18/2013 2:09 PM, Vernon Hamberg wrote:

I'm with Allen here. You can put HTML static pages in your DocumentRoot
and serve them just fine - a developer can put together a page in a text
editor or Eclipse or some other Web editor.

Get used to using Firefox with it's Firebug addin - this will really
help understand what is happening, as well as let a person make changes.

Go to www.w3schools.com for lots of good tutorial help.

Look at books from www.sitepoint.com - they'll have things on all the
stuff - CSS, JavaScript, etc.

Maybe try to find material that emphasizes modern techniques like using
<div>s for layout, not tables, and that show using CSS for presentation,
instead of putting all that look-feel stuff in the HTML file - that's
for content only, so much as you can.

w3schools has stuff to show how to put CSS inside the HTML file - not a
bad idea when starting, then that can be moved (externalized).

Then you want to figure out how to write to the browser from RPG. I am
fairly new on using CGIDEV2 and love it - it externalizes HTML in a
manner similar to DSPFs. The RPG is very clean. The procedure to write
something to the browser is wrtSection('section-name');

It will also be necessary to learn how to respond to forms in a web
page. CGIDEV2 has nice procedures that insulate you from the CGI APIs
that are a bit messy.

This method has you pretty much working tight to the Apache process -
things like PHP and ASP .Net and maybe even Java put wrappers around
these things, but they are really doing CGI under the covers, you could say.

HTH - it's kind of a record of some of my learning history.
Vern


On 1/18/2013 1:35 PM, Allen, Todd wrote:

I think I'd start with some HTML tutorials. One of the concepts I had trouble with when I started web development was the fact that the ultimate product of any scripting language is an HTML file that is served up in the browser. Grasping that concept and the syntax of HTML is the logical first step, in my opinion. Once there is a solid understanding of HTML then work on scripting, CSS, JavaScript, etc. can be introduced.

Thanks,
Todd


-----Original Message-----
From: web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Booth Martin
Sent: Friday, January 18, 2013 1:51 PM
To: Web Enabling the IBM i (AS/400 and iSeries)
Subject: Re: [WEB400] Reading data

dang. Failure to communicate. You are never dense, so this is my shortcoming. This probably demonstrates why I am having trouble with the project - I don't know enough to even explain it so of course I can't do it. Let me try again.

Lets say I am an average RPG programmer working in a shop with home-grown code on a relatively new piece of hardware, and with software that has evolved slowly but steadily since 1981. The applications work, the boss is happy, and we finally got rid of all our old terminals 8 years ago. I've kept up with my RPG and none of my new code is fixed format, I am using %bifs. I am keeping up, more or less.

Lets also say I want to start providing the sales people and managers with Intranet solutions instead of with 5250, spoolfiles, and PDFs. I have seen http://MYi:2001/HTTPAdmin and I built a small static website.
In my case, I can even publish reports there. But I want to do more.

Where do I start?

On 1/18/2013 8:55 AM, Jon Paris wrote:

On 2013-01-18, at 7:59 AM, web400-request@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

What I believe is the next baby step: I would like to add a flavor to
the physical file from a web page. Perhaps edit/delete, too, if that
is a small step. But I do not understand the process very well. In
the end I want to have the ability to add an image for the flavor, too.

Any comments are welcome. I am hoping I can make the Ice Cream Project
as a beginners guide for RPG programmers. "Keep it Simple" is the key
phrase.

Booth - my apologies if I am being dense but I haven't a clue what you are trying to do. A "beginners guide" to what?

I have gone through all of your web pages and studied the code and I'm still clueless.

Are you trying to show how to write 5250 replacement code? A graphical extension to existing 5250 apps? I just have no idea.

Hard to comment ...


Jon Paris

www.partner400.com
www.SystemiDeveloper.com

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