Thanks for the info. What I am looking for here is: just a front-end GUI which will interact with the existing C programs. The base application is written in "C". That is not going to change(That is one heck of the job to re-write the C application). Perl programs will be used to get the data from C programs and display it in a Graph and some fancy menus will be used to drive the C applicaiton.
For graph I will be using GD and for menus CGI/Javascript/DHTML/CSS and of course, Apache is my web interface. How good is this solution? Ganesan. >>Please correct me if this is wrong. >> >> What is the big difference between "web frontend" and a "normal GUI"? >>Can't >>you do everything in the "web frontnend" that you do in "normal GUI"? >> > >No, not at all. The web is bound by HTTP and HTML. This comes with >many ramifications. > >There are three main areas where I have and you will run into problems: > >- Real-time data updates. HTTP is stateless: it serves up the page then >closes the connection. Any updating involves a round-trip back to the >server. In traditional GUI, you just hold a db connection and repaint >the areas that are updated. >- State maintenance. Since it is stateless, you have to jump through a >lot of hoops to realize that two requests are coming from the same >person, since they could be handled by two different child processes or >even two different servers. This has all sorts of ramifications on user >login, user preferences, where the user was in the application, etc... >you have to do a lot of work on the server side to realize that it's the >same client that keeps talking to you. >- Fancy interface widgets/layouts. HTML/CSS/JavaScript/DHTML can only >get you so far. If you need fancy menu types, forms, layouts, etc... it >quickly becomes tedious/impossible on the web. > >This is just the tip of the iceberg. > >-Fran
