Re: JavaScript for web-based 4GL (was: OpenQM doco in Wiki)

Hi Frosty
Thanks for that, I can see where you are coming from. Being new to this
sort of stuff I thought that ADO would have been part of anything. I
thoroughly agree with mandating the environment, trying to be all things to
everyone is a recipe for disaster especially as the dominant browser is free
and does anything that one could need. I know somone will bound in with
Zappo is so much better and bug free to which I say baloney. None of them
are bug free, it is just that some products are so hidden nobody can be
bothered attacking them. I well remember the IBM 360 operating system had
over 1500 documented errors that were never going to be fixed on the basis
that it either wasn't necessary or might blow something else.
I had many discussions with my partner about allowing user access to the
front end. He was dead against it and I only started it some years later.
25 years on I am now reconsidering the situation and I believe that some
sort of half way house control is probably best. In that way the add-in
does not go berserk and wreck everything else, plus by being contained
within a rule set it is documented for all to see.
By the way do you realise that 37 years ago (21 July 1969) man landed on the
moon without a working computer. The Parkes telescope lost its computer
program through a power failure and picked up the signal by looking out of
the window and aiming at the rising moon on the basis that that was the most
likely place to find the module. Meanwhile as the module came into land the
module computer fried itself. The landing crew notified NASA with one of
those lovely cryptic comments that we all love, I think it was 1201, a
lovely error message that caused nobody outside NASA any concern whereas
those with the book in front of them had laundry problems.
Peter McMurray
"frosty" <frostyj@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:fe2dnZkrjY6pZl3ZnZ2dnUVZ_r-dnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Peter McMurray wrote:
Hi Frosty
I am interested in why you want to add javascript. Surely it is the
standardisation of the Display - Presentation Layer - that is one of
the major benefits of any 4gl.
Surely all rules type testing should be at the server end.
Peter McMurray

WYKIWYL (What You Know Is What You Like) is one reason; I've been using
JavaScript on web pages for some time now, with some degree of success.
Not sure what "rules type testing" means, but I don't think that's what
I need JavaScript to do; it's usually some aspect of the Presentation
Layer that's not readily available. Another use is to control ActiveX
controls on the web page. A little back story: our application mandates
the user shalt have WinXP, IE 6, and our root URL in their Trusted Sites.
So we're not trying to be all things to all people, and our pages are
not "public" in any sense -- you can't get to them without username and
password. So we have no problem using ActiveX when needed, for example
to control various TWAIN-compliant scanners within our document imaging
module. (Couldn't mandate a scanner, unfortunately.) I'm guessing any
product that doesn't support JavaScript doesn't support ActiveX, either.
Here's an example of JavaScript usage: there's a select control on the
page, with a list of companies in it. Next to that is another select
with a list of operators in it. When the user changes the selection in
the first select, we repopulate the second (multiple) select with just
those operators who are in the selected option of the first (not mult.)
select. Pretty standard stuff, which we do entirely in the client, w/o
going back to the server -- no AJAX or the like. Now, if the 4GL has a
way to link two selects like this, fine; if not: JavaScript. Just one
example; we come up with lots of ideas how to do UI stuff, some of which
might be handled by somebody's 4GL, or might be included in some future
release of that 4GL, or might never make it into that 4GL. Dirty Harry
said (IIRC) "A man's gotta know his limitations;" so does any good 4GL.
Knowing your limitations means providing for the "extra" stuff that you
know your 4GL will never do. If the 4GL runs inside a web browser, it's
not unreasonable to assume that the "extra" stuff will be written in
JavaScript.

--
frosty



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