According to Jeff Kell:
>
> On Sat, 25 Mar 1995 14:23:58 -0600 Richard Gambrell said:
> >BTW Any of you 4-gl providers interested in making the hp3k web server
> >have friendly access to Image? This sounds to me like a market
> >opportunity...
>
> Well, that's intercepting things at too low of a level.  What you really
> need is a cgi-bin "shell" for applications.  Recall that a Web transaction
> sends a chunk of data (request) and returns output to the client.  If you
> can "encapsulate" an arbitrary program so that the "request" is fed to its
> $stdin, and it's $stdlist is returned to the client, you've got a start.
> Then you can insulate the application from the network programming.  The
> same approach could be used to hook in a gopher transaction (as Eric is
> doing at Notre Dame).
>
> I'm a little apprehensive about the startup/load/DBOPEN/etc overhead
> with this though, but I don't see any obvious way to clean it up given
> that the Web server will create a new instance of the cgi-bin process
> for each transaction.  Maybe IPC files(?)...
>
> [\] Jeff Kell, [log in to unmask]
>
 
A pair of message files could be setup, so that the database
report provider-process could just suspend waiting for the next request.
 
I don't know a lot about how the Web servers talk to other processes, as
yet, but I do know that I would really like to be able to feed quiz or
quick output as a result of a URL (especially if I have the username, etc.)
 
It seemed to me that someone out there might find a good market for a
tool (or set of tools) to do this. A tool that would format database
information into html based on search data input from a secure form with a
username - this would be really useful, but if it built on top of
a known report writer(s) like quiz then it would be more than useful.
 
--
-- - - - Speaking for myself and not necessarily anybody else - - - - - -
Richard Gambrell        | Internet: [log in to unmask]
Mgr. Tech. Services     | POT:      504-483-7454     FAX: 504-482-1561
Xavier University of LA | Smail:    7325 Palmetto, New Orleans, LA 70125