Re: How common is it to write http sites in pl/sql

From: Tim X <timx_at_spamto.devnul.com>
Date: 30 Jan 2003 23:22:46 +1100
Message-ID: <87d6mesu7d.fsf@tiger.rapttech.com.au>

>>>>> "Norman" == Norman Dunbar <Norman.Dunbar_at_lfs.co.uk> writes:

 Norman> Morning Marc, this webby stuff is popular today !

 Norman> I've written one single soliraty web site based on data held
 Norman> in an Oracle database.  I've used PSP to do it - basically,
 Norman> using PL/SQL procs and packages to build a dynamic web page
 Norman> on the fly.  It works brilliantly for me. :o)

 Norman> I first started writing that PSP stuff in a 'proper' HTML
 Norman> editor package where you can put in 'new' tags etc like '<%
 Norman> stuf %>' and so on, these are passed through a commandline

 Norman> utility called loadpsp which converts the new tags into  Norman> PL/SQL and builds a procedure in the database.

 Norman> In the end, I got fed up of using PSP and loadpsp as the
 Norman> generated procs were, to put it mildly, very difficult to
 Norman> read, so I reformatted them and now just do it all in PL/SQL
 Norman> procs. See my post in the thread 'Website using Oracle' where
 Norman> I show examples of the stuff I'm on about.

I have to agree the procedures loadPSP generates are pretty bad, but I still find it easier to do your basic web page layout in HTML and have embedded PL/SQL procedures via the <%...%> tags. I tend to use quite a bit of the htf/htp packages within my procedures, but find its best to keep the basic page layout in HTML as its a lot quicker than writing PL/SQL pages (for me) and I don't worry about the way the procedures loadPSP generates look in the db as I never really look at them anyway.

Personally, I find the server page concept (wether PSP or JSP) is quite good once your web site gets reasonably large - certainly a lot faster and easier to edit a few simple HTML pages when you need to make some minor layout etc changes.

<snip>

 Norman> PPS. I tend to try to keep by 'get the data' logic separate
 Norman> from my 'print the data as html' logic, but each to their own
 Norman> :o)

I actually think this is quite important and have to admit I concentrate more on the get the data stuff rather than the print it out all nice and sexy stuff. In fact, what I've been trying to achieve is a situation where a few of our web monkeys who enjoy all that HTML stuff can concentrate on that and know next to nothing about PL/SQL or even Oracle and I concentrate on the procedures to provide the data they want etc. I find this a nice division of labor as I personally find HTML extremely boring - to me it brings back memories of days long gone by formatting documents with wordstar pro and LaTeX - word processing, yawn!

The really nice thing with this PSP stuff is that you can concentrate on the data and someone else can concentrate on the look of the web site - doing it all in pure pl/sql often means you get hassled to change simple procedures of essentially nothing more than print statements because some marketing wiz kid has decided the frame needs to be on the other side or the image needs to be larger or whatever and your the resident Oracle PL/SQL guy, so despite the fact you have a lot of database skills you end up spending time stuffing around with getting some formatting issue worked out.

Tim

to.

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Received on Thu Jan 30 2003 - 06:22:46 CST