Guest.Visitor
01-01-1995, 02:00 AM
On Saturday, September 26, 1998, 04:04 PM, Carl Rinker wrote: Carl To program for the Web, you need to be able to design web pages. There is no tool for that on the AS/400. You will have to get a PC based tool. We have been writing applications for browsers for the past 18 months. We started with the Inet web server for the AS/400 as IBM did not have a suitable web server at that time. We have a 30 person shop. We have Web page designers, VB programmers, COBOL programmers. Because we are a large enough shop, we can afford to have specialist. Many small shops have not been able to go to client server or web based programming, because it has required to many skill sets. Web programming is a client server type of programming. You write programs that run under the browser and on the server. We have staff trained in VB. When Microsoft developed activateX browser programming for VB, out staff was able to use it with very little training. This means our browser programs only work on Intel based Microsoft browsers. The server side applications are written in COBOL on the AS/400. This method draws on what we already know. The Java community is trying to create a single language that can be used for the server and the client. IBM has had Visual Java for client side applications for some time. V4r3 has Java on the server side. However, we have never converted the client side to Java. The VB programmers can do things that the visual Java can not. They can do this because, they are writing for the PC and can take advantage of things that are not in the universal Java machine. We also need VB skills for the VBA in Microsoft office. As a result, our PC staff prefers VB. If Java is to be used for our client and our servers, it will have to come from the AS/400 programmers. They want to have complete control of an application. They want to be able to program the client and server. But, that means learning a client side language. We know it will take at least two years to train the staff in a new language. In a shop our size, even if we go to a single language, we would continue to have specialist. So, some people in our staff say we should stay with what we have. They complain that a conversion to Java is abandoning everything we already know. What size is your shop? Do you have PC programmers? If so, what do they program in? Do you want to create Internet or Intranet applications? No matter what language you use, you should adopt a multi tier programming model for your applications. You should write all applications so that the business rules are separate from the presentation. We get the same business transaction from many sources. We get transactions from batch transfers, bar code scanners, green screens, web, EDI etc. We create standard transaction formats for each business transaction. We then create a business rules program that can process the transaction from all of these sources. This means a green screen program formats the data into a transaction and calls a business rules program to process the transaction. Data from the CGI comes in as variable length keyword data. We write a program to convert it into a fixed length transaction then call the same business rules program as the green screen. You must adopt this method or be prepared to re-write all of your business rules for each transaction source. In developing your business rule programs, do not rely on persistent connections. The business rule programs should have no memory of the previous transaction. You know that the same green screen user is calling the same business rules program each time. On the web, the business rule program is called by the web server when a particular transaction is sent to the server. A transaction could come from user A then the next from user B. JHicks@SUZ.com