Re: Dynamic Web Page

Nick Nobbe (nnob@loc.gov) wrote: : On Tue, 23 Jul 1996, John P. Zucchero wrote: : > > Imagine yourself in a large brokerage office. Your task is to design : > > a system to allow brokers to pull up client portfolios in one window : > > and in the same window show the current trading prices in REAL TIME. : > : > The web is stateless, i.e. You make a connection, get your data, : > end the connection. This is a good solution for the web to not : > cause saturation, but for a database app, it is bad. : > : John, : I heard an interesting solution to this problem at the Informix : World Conference in Chicago. Apparently, their Advanced Technology : Group has software libraries that they install at your web site : that solves the problem of spawning processes for each database : request - one connection, multiple requests, one process (Don't : quote me; speak to Informix). I believe security is not implemented : in the new package, which once it's working corrrectly, may be : given away. From what I understood is, yes, an application is spawned off to handle your client and it does stay running (at least for a time). I believe they said that it passes the communications off to a separate TCP/IP port. When the browser communicates again, it uses this new port and talks to the running program. The running program mostly just sits and listens until it is triggered again, then it serves up new data in response to the browser's actions. If the browser never talks to you again (or waits too long), your program times-out after a while and goes away. If the browser does communicate again, the port it's trying to talk to will have dissappeared because no one is listening anymore and you get a communications error. For anybody who got too wordy on the On-Line Conference Evaluation form in Chicago, you'll understand what I'm talking about. Several people took too long filling out their forms and the evaluation form program died. When they finally sumbitted their form, they got TCP/IP errors. If you filled out the form really fast, it worked like a charm. In any event, I don't think that this is exactly what is being asked for. As was stated in another post, the nature of the web doesn't let you "push" information to a browser. This, (although some people probably think it would be great) would be very annoying. Imagine trying to follow a thread, while the last URL keeps throwing up the current price of Informix stock on your browser. A browser is a connect, get some info, disconnect, then display/run type of operation. The new Informix software is a sort of, "Hang on, I'll get back to you later" sort of thing. You still connect, get info, and disconnect, with the exception that if you connect again, you can talk to the same app that serviced you previously because you've been pushed off to a private line to communicate on. You still can't push new info to the browser side real-time. __________________________________________________________________________ Joel Schumacher JCPenney Co. - UNIX Network Systems jschumac@uns-dv1.jcpenney.com 12700 Park Central Pl (214) 591-7543 Dallas TX 75251