Tom Hebenstreit - Clarion, the Web, and You

Posted September 1 1997

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Tom Hebenstreit gave a talk near to my heart today. The subject, Clarion, the Web, OOP, and You, is one that I could have used before writing the Clarion Online application. It would have saved so much time it's not funny. Unfortunately, there was more subject matter than time, because it seemed like Tom was just getting to the meat of his presentation when it was over.

While some may think that this talk was another of the discussions on CWIC (there were five devoted to CWIC, and many others talked about the product) it was actually about using Clarion to write web applications without using CWIC. You might wonder how its done. I know I used to.

After a lengthy overview of what happens on the web, Tom got into the meat of the talk, using Clarion for database access on the web. Among the different ways to attach a database to a web application are:

• Standard CGI (Common Gateway Interface), in which the environment and command line pass parameters to your applicaiton. Your application then supplies a web page in return.
• WinCGI, a version of CGI written for Visual Basic programmers. This uses an INI file to pass parameters, and is slower and more cumbersome than CGI.
• The Internet Server Application Program Interface, or ISAPI, which is a database layer developed by Microsoft for IIS. This approach gives very fast response, but is very cumbersome unless you use...
• ISAPI and the Tornado OCX, The OCX mediates between the server and Clarion.

Clarion Online uses Standard CGI because of the flexibility, but Clarion Online is not a true database package. Tom recommended the last approach (ISAPI/Tornado) for writing database applications in a CWIC-less Clarion.

Tom then led us through the differnet ways that a browser communicates with a server and your application, and gave us a list of basic tools if Web design using Clarion is in our future.

In all, a great talk. I would have loved to hear the whole thing, but maybe Tom can do that next year.

For those interested, Tom will be writing an article for Clarion Online covering this subject in a future issue of Clarion Online.

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