Hi Brian,
Sorry for the delay--we have been traveling back to the US and then
settling back in. Your message has been very thought provoking. I have
always tried to do everything by myself, and had not thought of
partnering with (or hiring) a web designer. DataPerfect lends itself
quite well to one person doing a major project, but that only holds for
the DOS world. In the web world, I can see that I am going to have to
change my ways and involve another person to be effective--or become a
web designer as well.
As for your SSH difficulties, would you like me to reset your password?
If so, please reply privately with the password you would like to use.
Best wishes,
Bruce
Brian Hancock wrote:
Hi Bruce,
Yes it has been quite a learning process... however the further I went
the further I realised how easy it is to compartmentalise the work.
If you start with the premise that DataPerfect only ever exports XML.
you only need to know very basic XML, ie elements, and attributes and
the general design of the structure, very simple work. The PERL scripts
are somewhat generic, and usually from one interaction (script) to
another I am usually just changing the name of the DataPerfect report
number and then renaming the script, and as I said it could for many
things all come from the script as to which report to run, although that
thought does send nervous chills up my spine.
But back to the compartmentalising. You can readily get a web designer
to design templates and the page, you just need to tell them to make all
of the links to resources on the page absolute HTTP references (eg
http://www.domain.com/eimage.icon.gif rather than icon.gif. From there
if it is not in XHTML (you should have asked the web designer for that
in the start).
From then it just needs an XML programmer to write the XSLT from the
DataPerfect XML, and from there you might have the core of the application.
If you write the DP application to export the HTML then any maintenance
to the HTML needs to be done in DataPerfect. I am no web designer, when
I design web pages there are usually no graphics, and no pretty things,
no clever interface things, so I would be far better letting someone
skilled to do that part of the project. Getting an web page designer
even a good one is really a pice of cake these days.
For me this project was a voyage of discovery, so now I know what is
possible, it will not necessarily mean that I will be the one to do it.
With regards to your Firestorm application one thing which worried me
about writing back to the database, was that at the stage of its
development when I tried it, it meant that automatic features like Keep
A Total, Auto-Create Record (thru link), Cascade-Delete, Cascade-Update
did not work. My attraction to the DP Silent mode was that you are using
all the standard features of DP, just that you access them via reports
rather than via the desktop. Or perhaps I have missed something in
Firestorm...
Quite apart from wheither using Firestorm or DataPerfect Silent Mode, as
I said before the advantage of XML is that the application can totally
be separated into the application and the presentation. It would be
possible to create a generic application, that you could give to web
designers (with XML skills) just the the details of the posts, and the
scheme of the return XML. If a client wanted to update the look and feel
of the website and web application every 3 months that would be no deal
at all for the DataPerfect programmer.
By the way, I tried using the DP-web.net site, and I got totally screwed
up, I tried to SSH into it so I could clean up my mess and see what was
happening, but the login wouldn't let me there. Is there a trick to that?
I am looking through your notes and I will give some of the stuff you
have there a try.
Thanks
Brian
----- Original Message ----- From: "Bruce Conrad" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "DataPerfect Users Discussion Group" <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, June 15, 2006 1:29 AM
Subject: Re: [Dataperf] Web enabling DataPerfect
Hi Brian,
Thank you for this exhaustive documentation of your work. I especially
enjoyed the Tips page. It is impressive that you are able to form a
business around it. The new languages and systems you have learned
form quite an impressive list: DataPerfect, t-log format, CGI and
HTTP, Perl, HTML, CSS, XML, XSL, XPath, XHTML, Flash, Apache, Linux,
DOSEMU, MIME, PDF, sendmail, etc.
To use Firestorm effectively, one would need to learn just
DataPerfect, CGI and HTTP, C, Firestorm, HTML (or preferably XHTML).
And, I can see that CSS would also be very useful. But the C
programming language is by far the hardest of these, which gives your
approach great value.
Just over a year ago, I began work on DP-web, which would allow
reducing the list of needed languages to DataPerfect, t-log format,
and HTML (or XHTML). To do fancier things, one would need to learn
CSS, MIME, and sendmail, and possibly the XML, XSL, XPath family as well.
DP-web is provides a single Perl script similar to yours, that uses
DOSEMU to run DP in silent mode. The Perl script however is universal.
It depends on a DP database to hold the information that varies from
one of your Perl scripts to another, including a mapping from a short
name to the report number(s) to run. But, the user of DP-web would not
have to understand the Perl/Firestorm/DOSEMU portion of the system.
Really, I think the hardest part in doing this is changing one's point
of view from the desktop to the Internet. As you point out, it is
easier to do it for a new application than to retrofit an existing
one. And, much of the work is in designing the web pages themselves,
and the relationships between them. DataPerfect makes the analogous
thing on the desktop (panels and the relationships between them) very
easy. I have not found any web authoring tools that make this easy for
the Internet.
My own "flagship" web application (a joint venture with Tony Perez) is
"Know & Enjoy Mexico" (KEM), went into operation 9 years ago. It is
based on an existing DP application, belonging to Tony, who did all of
the web page design, including the relationships between the different
kinds of pages. This made my job, of generating each type of page from
the database, much more straightforward.
I have implemented a few other applications using Firestorm, and it is
quite a lot of work. Also, as you point out, changes are very
difficult to realize. The portion of the work done in DataPerfect is
actually very easy. It is the HTML coding of the web pages, and the
writing of C programs to generate them which is most challenging.
One direct comment is to answer your questions about Firestorm in part
7, the paragraph on AJAX. It is very possible to use it with an
application where the STR file is changing. The KEM project has
undergone several database structure changes, but it is rather
difficult to manage these changes, so I resist them. Other Firestorm
applications, including DP-web itself, use writing to the database
extensively, and this works very well. KEM uses it to count daily
accesses to each type of page. BTW, the scripts used to return text
data to the AJAT sample you mention are very simple Linux shell
scripts that make use of the Firestorm command line interface.
Many thanks again for sharing your work with all of us.
Best wishes,
Bruce
KEM is at http://www.knowmexico.com/
DP-web is at http://DP-web.net/
Firestorm is at http://sanbachs.net/firestorm/
Brian Hancock wrote:
Hi Everyone,
I promised some time ago that I would document the work that I have
been doing with web enabled DataPerfect applications.
Because I was involved with a soccer club I have had an ideal test
bed to try out DataPerfect. This is not just producing static webpage
but is online interactive with the database.
Using DataPerfect as a backend web application may not be everyone
cup of tea, but it offers a myriad of opportunities if you are
willing to give it a go.
I started writing the details up as an email and realised it was way
to complex so I have set up a few web pages that tells the story. The
website it refers to is at: http://www.brileigh.net/bws and the story
is at http://brileigh.net/bws/story
I hope people can give me some feedback.
Thanks
Brian
_______________________________________________
Dataperf mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.dataperfect.nl/mailman/listinfo/dataperf
_______________________________________________
Dataperf mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.dataperfect.nl/mailman/listinfo/dataperf
_______________________________________________
Dataperf mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.dataperfect.nl/mailman/listinfo/dataperf
_______________________________________________
Dataperf mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.dataperfect.nl/mailman/listinfo/dataperf
