At 8:18 AM -0500 4/27/01, Rick Johnson wrote:
>I know almost nothing about Perl, and joined this list to ask one question.
>I really hope somebody can steer me in the right direction.
>
>We have a digital asset management system that's heavily scripted in Perl,
>and runs in conjunction with Oracle on an RS-6000 under AIX. The mac client
>to this system is slow and clumsy, so I'd like to write a simple front end
>utility program (in REALbasic) for adding photos and artwork to the
>database from our Macs. Can MacPerl serve as a means of communication
>between a Mac application and Perl on AIX?
Yes.
>Or, since REALbasic apps under
>OS X can generate Unix terminal commands, perhaps it could communicate
>directly with Perl on the RS-6000.
Yes.
> Or since REALbasic can communicate with
>Oracle, perhaps it could bypass Perl and talk directly to Oracle.
Yes.
>Has anyone on this list had experience with something like this?
Probably. I haven't had direct experience with the things you're
asking about, but have had experience with similar things in
different environments.
Here's what I think the real key to this problem is - what you are
most comfortable with. You've said your goal is to write a simple
Mac client for your database. So, you should do that in whatever way
is easiest for you. If you know Perl and Database access, MacPerl
might be for you - but probably not since there aren't any (that I
know of) Oracle DBDs for the Mac. if you know Real Basic and the
Unix interface to Oracle, but not perl, use your second option.
As Bart said, your best bet is probably sticking with RealBasic and
accessing Oracle directly. BUT, the Perl scripts running on your AIX
machine might be doing a lot of relational integrity that your
RealBasic App might have to redo. In that case, I'd try to talk to
the Perl apps on AIX using RB.
Regardless, you should build your front end in RealBasic because it
will be easiest and fastest to build, and if necessary, talk to
MacPerl from RB using AppleScript. (Embedded Perl, essentially).
At least, that's my opinion.
-Jeff Lowrey
