In recent weeks I've received a number of messages from HP3000-L members
gently chastising me for not announcing the SRN Website to the list when
it went up last year.  Mea culpa.  Their ire was raised, in particular,
by the discovery of the HP3000 IRISLink Web Access demo and the lack of
explanation of "what we were up to".
 
Oops.  I sent out announcements through the SRNIRIS-L and failed to
include the HP3000-L in the list of recipients.  My apologies to all who
are interested in HP3000 Websites.
 
While IRISLink is not a product offering for the general public, and is
therefore of limited interest to the list, the demo provides an example
of the HP3000 working as a webserver and may (for illustration purposes)
be of some interest to those on the list needing to show management their
data is accessable from web browers.
 
To summarize: SRN has put a demonstration HP3000 system on the web
containing a dozen or so access paths to data residing in IMAGE data
bases.  The paths are bundled up in three "web groupings": routines to
retrieve "public" data, routines to retrieve "private" data, and routines
to retrieve both public and private data as the "administrator" of data.
We demonstrate data entry, as well as data retrieval; we show
cross-linking of data (imbedded hotlinks from the data base to related
data); we imbed images; and we do generic ad-hoc retrieval from the data
base.  IRISLink was introduced to our IRIS customer base in October at
their North American User Group Meeting in Virginia Beach.  HP's George
Stachnik, who gave a presentation at the meeting, critiqued the prototype
and encouraged us to add more functionality showing off the features of
the HP3000.
 
The IRISLink demonstration at the SRN website is the original prototype
for the product ... we are in the process of preparing a more useful
"beta" release for several of our higher education clients and when it is
ready, we will upgrade the demonstration site as well.  The final release
will employ JAVA and HTML 3.0 features to accomplish an acceptable level
of "ease of access" to data, as well as data entry techniques.
 
To see a demo, point your browser to http://webster.srn.com/generic.html
or visit the SRN homepage at www.srn.com and link to Generic College.
I strongly suggest reading the documentation links (even printing them
out) before trying the demo.
 
If you are interested in hearing more about why we did things the way we
did them, or in an overview of the straightforward techniques used to
interface the web to a COBOL/IMAGE application, send me a note.
 
weh
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Wayne E. Holt                                        206-463-3030 (Voice)
Software Research Northwest, Inc.                    206-463-9393   (FAX)
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