On 20 Jun 1997 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > [Randy Terbush] > | > | CGI is certainly an option. > > I disagree. CGI gives you a session-by-session based interaction with > a very limited user interface, namely the FORMS interface in your > browser. you could use a Java applet, but I have a *very* strong > distaste for using Java in important applications�. > > I am currently using PHP/FI a lot to do database interfaces on WWW and > sometimes it's a REAL struggle not to have direct access to the data. > you have to think in terms of "requests" and "sessions" and you end up > doing a lot of ineffective, ugly, and potentially risky hackery to > preserve state, carry data around etc. > > I think we should forget about WWW for a while and just imagine it's > not there. it's not important to solve the problem and I feel the > problem is best solved by trying to build something robust and > portable that is independent of the WWW-server.
I really don't think that is the direction efforts should be focused right now. I would suggest it would be quite difficult making a useful interface that works easily on all Unix platforms and Windows without doing many difficult things. You also then need to implement a way of accessing it remotely, add another communications method, etc. A web browser is limited but I have no reason to think it can't work. An admin server is easier than some things because it isn't a problem to make it a more heavy weight since few people will normally be accessing it at once.
