Webspeed examples and best practices

[jdaniel052]

Good morning everyone,
We are starting down the road of webspeed and I was wondering if anyone knows of any sites that may have simple examples using webspeed. We are going to use webspeed mostly for reporting. for easy of maintenace, should we look more at using speedscript or CGI wrappers?
Thanks for your input.

 

[Lee Curzon]

http://amduus.com/4glwiki/index.php?pagename=Learning Webspeed

There are the Progress Webspeed docs (although I'm not sure they are great examples).

Geoff Crawford has written a useful book on the subject (mostly admin info, but covers the application basics).

There is also the Peg/Web forum - www.peg.com

I'm just starting out with Webspeed myself, and as far as I can tell, a good knowledge of 4GL, HTML and Javascript should carry you through.

Webspeed itself is just a framework for mixing 4GL with Presentation language (eg. HTML) - never a good idea, but I'm not sure there is an easy way round it. You may find it helpful to look at ASP (old ASP, not .Net) manuals and code libraries, as I believe the two operate along similar lines (code mixing wise). I may be wrong on that point though.

HTH

Lee

 

[gcampbell]

Personally, I don't think it's a good idea to intertwine BL with the UI ... in this case, Progress code (or Speedscript) with HTML. So I'd recommend that you utilize CGI Wrappers as much as possible. This makes it easier for transitioning your app to other future platforms ... if required.

This is especially important if you are using this for mostly reporting. Why write code for different platforms -- CGI wrappers are a must for report output on the web.

And a thing to think about when producing reports for the web, if you need to develop landscape reports then I'd look into producing PDF output. Landscape text-based reports for the web are a pain to work with. There are many tools for producing PDF but if you want a Progress-based solution look into PDFinclude (http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/pdf-inc).

Later,
Gordon

 

[Lee Curzon]

Personally, I don't think it's a good idea to intertwine BL with the UI ... in this case, Progress code (or Speedscript) with HTML. So I'd recommend that you utilize CGI Wrappers as much as possible. This makes it easier for transitioning your app to other future platforms ... if required.

According to your recent (OpenEdge webspeed licensing) conversation with Geoff Crawford in Another Place, if they want a competitively priced modern Web application, another platform will definitely be required.

 

[gcampbell]

Depends on what version they are running. If V9 then it won't be an issue, otherwise, yes, they are screwed.