Re: A "sort of" Webserver question

I attempted to answer this question for a similar issue with Reports rather than graphics, so if it is ok, I will paste ( post ? ) that message here:

We had this challenge on a project where we needed to have a very scalable report generator ( including graphics and drill downs ) that delivered reports to users on web browsers. Basically, we used Oracle web server which generates web pages dynamically from PL/SQL procedures and packages and allows HTTP requests to be "routed" to PL/SQL procedures.

In this particluar case, we sent all the parameters for the report as HTTP parameters to the PL/SQL procedure. At a certain point in the procedure, was sent to the "Report Server" (to be defined) using DBMS_PIPES. Basically, you pack a bunch of data into a pipe and send it to another client process, registers for a unique alert and waits.

The "Report Server" is a Oracle Reports process running in a loop and polling for DBMS_PIPES messages. When it gets a PIPE message, it unpacks it, determines which report has been requested and processes the parameters to generate the report. The final HTML/PDF file can either be stored on a file system ( a virtual directory for the web server ) using a unique file name or can be stored in the database.

Once the reporting is complete, the report server sends an ALERT back to the calling process and passes the file name of the gtenerated report ( or the database record identifier ) back to the calling process.

The calling process receives the alert it registered for, and generates a response for the calling browser client that embeds or references the generated file.

The advantage of this system to us was that a report server could be run on any ( or any number of ) system that could run Oracle Reports and could connect to the relevant database. Hence, it scaled quite nicely and we had ample oportunity to tweak and add management consoles etc.

This is probably a real mouthful, but I can expand on any area if you need it.

Nicholas
nwhitehead_at_rocketmail.com

>Hi Everyone:
>
>I'm working on a Webserver project that requires me to run queries against
>several databases and display the results.
>
>No problem....except the user then wants me to graph the results (Combo Bar
>chart and line graph) .
>
>Does anyone have any ideas?
>
>Part of the project spec requires me to assume older versions of Netspace
>or I.E. as browsers. D2K for the Web with Oracle Graphics is not
>an option as these browsers will not be complient with the new JDK and
>there will be no way to get the runtime JDK to the various users.
>
>Should I look at Javascript? Any other products?
>
>Any help would be appreciated.
>
>Thanks,
>
>-Dan
>
>--
>"When all is said and done, a lot gets said, little gets done"
>
>My e-mail address has been altered to fustrate spammers.
>Please replace the "no.spam" with "sd.znet" to reply.
Received on Tue Oct 07 1997 - 00:00:00 CDT