We make extensive use of Microsoft's Active Server Page (ASP) for
integration with the HP 3000 as well as other platforms.  We can access data
sources (including IMAGE, KSAM, flat files) with and without ODBC.  We can
run programs either as remote proceedures and by controlling application
sessions (with and without terminal emulators). It is not necessary to move
either your applications or data to NT to use ASP.

Active Server Pages are an integrated facility that comes with Microsoft's
Internet Information Server web server.  It is used instead of CGI/html to
provide a more efficient level of program integration with the Web server
than can be achieved with CGI. It includes the ability to integrate html
pages and ASP pages to define a website.  What ASP provides for is scripting
on both the client side and on the server side.  We use mostly server side
scripting.

A basic justification for ASP is it's use of the Microsoft Component Object
Model (COM) or ActiveX components.  ASP is built using COM and is structured
to support it very well.  Server side scripting is what one does with CGI.
With ASP several COM or ActiveX or .NET objects are predefined to allow the
developer to communicate with and get services from the Web server.  This
allows for a certain amount of communication with the Web server and other
pages and processes.  When this is used with the rest of the ActiveX or COM
facilities such as components and Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) it is
possible to extend the Web page to any other platform or computer (even one
that knows nothing about COM or ASP).

Integrating an HP 3000 application or data source or procedure (subroutine)
with ASP is largely a matter of creating an ActiveX COM component that can
be used to do the communication or making use of a component that already
exist.  Components that already exist include OLE/DB and ADO facilities for
ODBC data sources.  Creating new COM components can be done in a number of
different ways with a variety of languages.  It starts with the choice of
some middleware product that makes to effort reasonable.  However, when one
considers the time and expense to rewrite an entire application of to do
some of the other things I've seen, these costs and development times are a
fraction of the alternative.

Next, there are an amazing number of off-the-shelf tools to do development
using ASP.  Once a resource from the HP 3000 is made available through the
required components, the leverage is unbelievable.  Entire e-commerce
applications can be developed in very short times.

Bottom line - if you have an application that now exists on an HP 3000 and
you want to see it Web-enabled, many ASP based alternatives exist.  My
experience tells me that the most costly and error prone ones could include
porting the application to NT/Sql Server.  I believe in most cases it's
probably a waste of time and money.

Charles Finley
Transformix Computer Corporation
760-736-7001
Fax 760-736-7014

> -----Original Message-----
> From: HP-3000 Systems Discussion [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On
> Behalf Of John P. Bardessono
> Sent: Wednesday, May 02, 2001 8:09 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: (ASP) Active Server Pages info requested
>
>
> Is anyone using Active Server Pages on/against the HP3000?
> How about "Engine(s)" development?
>
> I've been told that to do this we need to migrate our HP3000
> application to
> MSSql/NT server (which I highly dought).
>
> Also helpful would be your definition of 1) ASP 2) "Engine(s)" and 3)
> Object.
>
> Thanks in advance for you input!
>
> * To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
> * etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *

* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
* etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *