Re: WWW interface to db

I have not had any experience using Oracle, but have been using Informix->Web for about 3 years now. I have written CGI in 4GL and ESQL and have found a few problems, but mostly have just good things to say about the development. Problems: 1) I wrote 4GL apps a few years ago using 4GL v4.1 (I think). It was very easy to do and the development time was very quick. I just upgraded to v6.01 a few months ago and tried my old libraries. It had problems because the new version forces you to have the two informix variables set before you run the app. I talked to our rep at Informix and they didn't have a solution to this. Netscape server will not allow you to set these env vars (it runs the parent process as root and spawns children as www. If you only use ESQL, it isn't a prob. 2) I've recently been working on integrating my apps into the Netscape server using NSAPI, still having trouble compiling them into shared objects on our DEC. 3) One thing I don't like is that there is no good tool to browse images in the server without creating a blob->web app. When I first started putting images in our server, it was frustrating because I couldn't tell if the problem was in my load function or in the view function (or both!). Anyway, now that that is fixed, no prob. Good points: 1) Informix has the base library done! Once you get the informix code to compile on your machine, most of the work is done for you. I made some modifications, but it saved me a lot of time to have the basic form libraries done. 2) After the libs are built, it is extremely easy to build new CGI's. Takes me about a week to write complete apps that use between 5-10 tables (including text & image blobs). 3) If you write your libs the right way, it is VERY simple to change the entire look and feel of the interfaces that you generate. I can modify the interfaces of the apps in a couple days. 4) They can be extremely fast with large amounts of data by writing them in C Hope this is helpful, email me if you have any other Q's. Kevin Ibrahim Head, Systems & Technology Development IAIMS Program, University of Washington kevin@u.washington.edu http://weber.u.washington.edu/~kevin http://www.hslib.washington.edu > I am interested in hearing some feedback from those who have evaluated > both products, or can give insight into one or the other. I need to > determine which product line to buy into...and then get on with the task > of doing web development. > > I am a C programmer (!perl) who is used to coding to API for db access or > using programs like GSQL or similar that allow end users to easily > retriece data and format output without having to get a programmer > involved. For more complex functions and retrievals, I would of course, > have to develop the C code