Mark W rote...
>We're trying to develop a Web-based Front-end for one of our apps. The
idea is
>to make it as simple as possible to present the data (from an IMAGE Database)
>in a web-page.

(sorry if I already mentioned the following many times before ;-)

I have played with Java servlets and JDBC access to IMAGE/SQL databases like
MusicDBE from IMSQL.SAMPLEDB.SYS quite some time ago and found it amazingly
straightforward and easy to implement. I have no experience with ODBC programs
and was only a beginner with Java and not an SQL expert.

Have used Java Web Server from Sun, Apache JServ from java.apache.org and
Jigsaw from www.w3.org (recently I also played with vqServer from vqsoft.com
but I did not take the time to also install my JDBC demo servlet that time).
Notice that all but the Sun trial version are free or freeware products.

I have been running the Java servlets on MPE/iX as well as my NT PC. Both
options are possible with JDBC access to the database as it will either go
through the loopback link or across the wire to get at the data. I even
had an insane setup with Apache running on MPE/iX, talking to the JServ
engine on my PC, which in turn used JDBC to get back to the 3000 database.
But this is not what you would want to do in real life applications :-)

A setup with Apache on Unix, Linux or NT talking to either Java servlets
or JDBC listener on the 3000 might be a more realistic scenario. Just keep
aspects like SSL availability, network isolation or firewalls as well as
load balancing in mind (in case you don't want/need all on the 3000).

When playing with Jigsaw, I even used it's SSI (server side include) feature
which allowed coding JDBC statements in the .shtml pages to display a list of
composers from MusicDBE. Jigsaw parsed the .shtml and merged the JDBC results
into the HTML before sending back to the client browser.

One thing I noticed with JDBC is that certain types of SQL queries can be
fairly slow compared to simple DBFIND/DBGET iterations, but in my case it
could be improved by using a stored procedure (did learn about them at that
very time) and calling this stored procedure from the JDBC servlet. I have
not yet done SQL updates but that should also be fairly straightforward
with JDBC.

One note on Java servlets compared to Java applets... The former run on the
web server machine and emit simple HTML to the web browser (unless you are
a fan of including JavaScript or VBScript tags), which makes the web pages
accessible for pretty much every browser you can think of. No downloads for
the latest Java VM needed on the client side. Can be a big plus, especially
if you are a "supporter" of the www.anybrowser.org idea.

Lars.

(also see Jazz paper and www.editcorp.com/personal/lars_appel for examples)