Visit CCA on the Web
By Kevin Fuller
Nearly everyone is inviting people into their web these days -- their Web site, that is. The World Wide Web has become an ubiquitous form of communication offering easy, affordable access to everyone. At CCA this means two things. The first is to provide a source of news, information, and services related to CCA and our products. Our Web site, www.cca-int.com, offers information about our Model 204, System 1032, and MarketPulse product lines. You can sign up for education classes, get contact information, and see demos. The site will be growing and changing rapidly over the next several weeks, adding more information and support services, so come back and visit often to see what's new.
The demos I mentioned relate to the second thing the Web means to CCA. As you develop your own Web sites, Internet access, or intranet applications, many of you will want access to your System 1032 or Model 204 data. You can do this today. Read the articles below to learn how you can connect to your data the same way we did, and then try out the demo at our Web site.
We'll be making it easier to create Web-based database access in the future, but why wait?
Model 204 Web demo development
By Ann Hulsing
When Mark LaRocca, Model 204 Senior Customer Support Engineer, designed the Model 204 Web demonstration for IMPACT '96, he envisioned an interactive Web page where users would identify themselves, make a request to Model 204, press a Submit button, and view the results of the request on the Web screen. LaRocca also wanted to demonstrate the latest development taking place in Model 204: the Remote Command Line (RCL) feature to be released in Connect* Version 2.0 and Model 204 Version 3.4.
For a Web server, LaRocca installed WebSite 1.1 software from O'Reilly Associates, Inc. on the same PC where he had installed Connect*. He chose WebSite because it is a multiuser server, easy to install, and offered for a great price. If he had not already installed Connect*, he could have done so then. (During the installation of Connect*, you are instructed to notify the Windows ODBC driver, as well as identify the Model 204 online.) With all the connections in place, LaRocca had only to open any Web browser to get to his site.
To design the Web page, LaRocca downloaded Microsoft Internet Assistant from the Microsoft Web page; it goes right into Microsoft Word. "This process was pretty self-explanatory," says LaRocca. He found designing the Web page also self-explanatory. As he entered what he wanted on the Web page, an .htm file was created with the HTML code necessary for display.
Pressing the Submit button launches the interaction between the user and Model 204 online. For this part of the design, LaRocca used Visual Basic to interface to Model 204 through Connect*. This took him about half a day to write the 40 lines of code, and two days to debug. He chose Visual Basic because it is standard, but he could have chosen C++, Microsoft Access, or PowerBuilder. The name of the Visual Basic procedure is embedded in the html code in the appropriate place.
Asked what he might do differently now, LaRocca replied, "I would install the Web server on an NT machine for the power. And I would move up to WebSite Pro, which has security features not found in WebSite."
Security issues are much more complex than actual Web site development. A site needs to determine how much security is required. LaRocca recommends, "Develop on a isolated PC in an isolated environment accessing an isolated Model 204 online."
"Since Web access relies on addresses, Web site development is very flexible and simple; at the same time it is very powerful. You get a lot of action for some very simple programming," says LaRocca. "You can develop a Web site today using Connect* Version 1.3.1 and Model 204 Version 3.2, although you will have only SQL functionality. But you can upgrade with our next release."
System 1032 Web demo development
When David Stone, Manager of Software Development, designed the System 1032 Web demonstration for IMPACT `96, he had two objectives: first, to demonstrate that he could access System 1032 data from the Web; second, to create the page using only System 1032, TCP/IP, and public domain software.
Stone envisioned a production application in which an end-user makes a series of selections on a screen- based form, then presses a Submit button. The results are displayed on the Web page in groups of thirty records retrieved at a time. The user can highlight any record to expand the display to all the fields in the record, including a photograph. The end-user can repeat these actions as many times as desired. To leave the application, the user clicks on the Reset button.
From the Web, Stone downloaded the Ohio State University daemon server to provide a Web server for OpenVMS. He then spent two weeks writing and debugging a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) script (about 1400 lines of code) for the System 1032 side of the Web server. He wrote his own script, because at the time there was no other way to maintain persistent access to the Web or retain context across calls. (A drawback to interactive Web applications is that each submitted request starts an entirely new request. No memory is kept of what datasets were previously opened and so on.)
When you click on the Submit button in the System 1032 Web demo, the CGI script reads the contents of the screen form and sends it to the System 1032 Web server, which processes the query. The results are sent back to the CGI script, where they are turned into HTML code, which is sent to the screen for display.
To design the Web page, Stone typed in HTML code using OpenVMS editors. When asked how he taught himself HTML, he replied, "I began by searching the Web."
He debugged his Web page design viewing it with the Mosaic Web browser. "When I wanted to design frames and tables, I consulted the Netscape home page where I found further HTML instructions by pressing the Handbook button. That brings up a tutorial and reference book."
To polish his Web page design, Stone also poked around the Web looking at other pages. When he found an attractive page, he pressed the View > Document Source option on the Netscape menu bar. Voila! The HTML code for the page is displayed.
Would he do anything differently now? In the -intervening time since he finished the System 1032 Web demo, software called FastCGI has come to market, which provides persistent access, but otherwise he would do the same.
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