Re: Web App for AS400 database -- WEB400

I've done a similar project (and I'm sure quite a few others here have as 
well). What worked best for me was to create a program that contained all of 
the logic needed to do the inquiry. I then implemented this program as a stored 
procedure which lets me call it from just about anything. I have front ended 
this with both CGI programs written in RPG and Java programs and it works well 
in both environments. It could also be front ended with a web service but there 
are performance disadvantages since the connections are stateless and if you 
use SOAP, there is XML processing to deal with.
 
If you want to run your web application on the AS/400, you can write CGI 
programs (RPG, COBOL, or C can be used), Java, Net.Data (IBM's answer to ASP 
but there is a bunch of performance overhead and it's very difficult to create 
rubust applications with), or PHP (you have to be on V5R3 or V5R4 of the OS to 
use this). If you are going to run the front end on a different platform, then 
the language choices become what ever is available on that platform. Which one 
to choose is not exactly an easy to answer question because typically, the 
choice is to use a language that the development team understands since it 
reduces project costs. 
 
Where it's deployed also determines in part on how to talk to the database. You 
will get better performance AS/400 to AS/400 than with any other platform. For 
Java programs, you'll use JDBC. The traditional AS/400 languages have native 
methods for I/O that will beat the pants off of anything else for small record 
sets with random data access. ODBC and OLEDB are also options for Windows 
platforms. Other options for communications is to use messge queueing or web 
services (both of these will require host programs to do the actual database 
communication but you'll likely want the business logic on the AS/400 anyway 
since the people knowledgable of it are working on that platform and if there's 
going to be lots of random I/O on small record sets, it's hard to beat the 
performance of the native I/O methods).
 
Without knowing more about how you intend to implement the web part, it's hard 
to give exact recomendations but this will hopefully give you some ideas.
 
Matt

________________________________

From: web400-bounces+matt.haas=thomson.com@xxxxxxxxxxxx on behalf of Faisal 
Malik
Sent: Sun 1/21/2007 10:42 AM
To: web400@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [WEB400] Web App for AS400 database



Hi Guys,

Ok first of all just to let you know I'm a newbie to AS400.

I have joined a new company and here we have AS400 running which contains
prices, stock availability etc... Currently our customers ring us to enquire
price and availability for a part and someone from customer services dept
will search for the part using the emulator on there PC and read out the
results to the customer.

We would like to provide this facility of searching a part price and
availability etc directly to our customers. We have massive amounts of
customers across the country so best way would be to design a web app and
make it available on our website.

My question is that first of all which programming language should I use to
program the we app i.e. asp or jsp or php or any other suggestions? And how
would I link the app with the AS400 database? When suggesting please keep in
mind the app has to be efficient because 100s of companies would be
interrogating the database simultaneously.


Many thanxxxx

Laura
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