Re: porting Access to SQL Server --- what to do with the front-end?

On Thu, 05 Mar 2009 09:56:02 -0800, rkc wrote:
If you get past all the crap asp.net writes to an html page and think
about all you really need it's no different than classic asp.

They are both server side languages. The browser still uses html,
javascript and css. It still sends the form and querystring variables
package as a request to the server in the same way. You can still write
code to get the elements of the request by using the Request.Querystring
and Request,Form collections. You can still do simple database access
using ADO.Net.

That's really all there is to it. The rest is just Microsoft obfuscating
what's happening.

Just to give a feel for the stuff I use...

As you state, HTMl, CSS, and javascript on the client (all hand-coded)
along with XSL, and XML.

Requests to the server use HTTP requests which send either URL-encoded
strings (for smaller stuff) or XML documents (for more complex stuff).
Quick requests are done synchronously while anything that would freeze
the user interface for a noticeable time-frame is done asynchronously.
Our client frame work makes it easy to create and respond to custom
events.

On the server we have a STRUTS driven framework that exposes the URL
encoded data as a Java List object or transforms the XML into a custom
Java object with XSTREAM. Those objects are passed to a library (IBATIS)
that can pull from them the parameters for database queries.

The resulting JDBC result set is automatically transformed by IBATIS into
XML for its return trip to the client. That is either stored in memory
as an XML document or transformed with XSLT into HTML that is inserted
into the page dynamically. Once one of my web apps is loaded in the
browser it is never replaced entirely. All changes in the browser window
are done dynamically. The speed and behavior is very much like a Windows
thick client app. We even have standardized client side objects for
creating pop-up draggable divs to simulate dialog forms and message boxes.

So far everything we use is free and Open Source. An Eclipse derivative
(WDSC from IBM) is our IDE, but we could just as easily use regular
Eclipse. We will at some point be dabbling in Flex that runs under the
Flash runtime. It could provide much faster data response times (only
occasionally an issue now) and a richer interface. The great big pile in
my job-jar is the only thing that has been putting that off.


--
Rick Brandt, Microsoft Access MVP
Email (as appropriate) to...
RBrandt at Hunter dot com
.

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