Re: Expert Advice Needed for Web Interface

If you'd really like it to be portable, I would strongly suggest perl5. Coming from your background, you shouldn't have any trouble at all picking it up. All of my programming buddies, after learning it, have become perl-mongers.

I've had experience creating a cgi-bin in perl running on NT, then moving it over to a Solaris box. No problem. In fact, if you write it correctly using DBD:DBI, you can even change databases later on very easily (if you can't afford the oracle licence). That's about as good as it gets. (and IMHO it's a helluva better webby language than PL/SQL htp.p's).

In addition to the O'Reilly book(s) (see Learning Perl, Programming Perl, and the perl cookbook, too), download some sample apps like some of the GNATS replacements (there's one that uses postgres which is very good). They'll really help you get started.

-jay

In article <36277608.9A065EC5_at_americasm01.nt.com_nospam>,   John Tutton <tutton_at_americasm01.nt.com_nospam> wrote:
> I am currently working on a project to build an Oracle database and a
> Web
> interface for searching the database. We're not sure where we're going
> to put
> the interface (i.e. what server), so I need to make the application as
> generic
> and portable as possible, and I'm trying make it so it's not going to
> require
> the sysadmin to make any changes to the server on which it will reside
> (e.g.
> installation of new software, etc). The database will reside on a Unix
> database
> server, and the Web interface will reside on a different Unix server.
>
> Here's my question:
> What tools/methods would YOU use to build a Web interface to an Oracle
> database?
>
> Currently, I'm leaning towards HTML forms (with maybe Javascript
> preprocessing)
> that invoke a CGI programs that access the database and return HTML
> pages with
> the search results.
>
> I am an experienced C and C++ programmer (with a little Java
> experience), but I've
> never used Perl. I've heard that Perl is definitely the language of
> choice for
> CGI. Would it be worth it to learn Perl? Is there a special version of
> Perl that
> I need to use? In a CGI book, it mentioned OraPerl, but I haven't been
> able to
> find any documentation for it.
>
> Any suggestions or comments would be greatly appreciated.
>
> -John Tutton
>
>

-----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==---------- http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own Received on Fri Oct 16 1998 - 00:00:00 CDT