An unregistered correspondent replied:
> Ouch if your focus is on the web for your data you may find
> webspeed can do the job, but support in terms of
> documentation, books, websites, resources are very very
> limited.
>>Which does indeed seem to be one of my major problems. >>Why, if Progress is so heavily used, has no one written a >>series of half decent books on the subject and why is there no >>active developer community willing to offer mutual support?</b>
Well to be honest it may be heavily used a bit on the east coast in the US and and outside the US, but Progress is not used nearly as much (Especially for web development) as Oracle (too pricey), DB2, SQL 2000, Sybase. Those are some of the big guns. And you'll notice they are mostly SQL specific databases. Not 4GL. I dont understand myself, why Progress is so bad in terms of materials and support. Why they dont have tons of books by Knight Ridder etc. They are really bad. Progress people will just say hey go look in the manual, or go to the Progress web site and lookup Kbase blah blah. It was just with version 9, that Progress actually started supporting SQL 92. THey fell behind in that area. Ask any Progress programmer, and they'll tell you how bad Progress is at marketing. Go to any web development site and look up Progress or webspeed. I guarantee you wont find anything. Thats not to say webspeed is bad. But its proprietary to Progress. </i>
> The more industry wide used options would have been to use
> PHP with MYSQL or Nusphere, OR active server pages with SQL
> 2000, OR a java / JSP with a java app server like Macromedia
> Jrun or IBM websphere. All of these platforms have lots of
> resources, lots of books, lots of informal websites and support.
>>We examined these options closely (and some others) but felt >>that the overall integration offered so much (from our third >>party Progress based accounts app straight through to our >>public web face) that we would go with it. It also offered a >>higher speed of development. No, please don't go on about >>how we have been succered by Progress sales force....
If you are a Progress shop, then webspeed was a good choice because its actually a pain to figure out how to connect and develop on Progress using more common development models like PHP or ASP. Perhaps a java app server, however, would have provided a more open environemnt supporting a common development standard for web apps. Just prepare to be a bit frustrated finding a good book. I really suggest some good webspeed training classes.</i>
> I dont recommend asking for help on these boards or looking
> for books on webspeed. With webspeed you'll be better served
> by taking some webspeed courses from an authorized
> Progress VAR or training center. Thats really the only way you'll
> get the real info you want to develop with webspeed.
>>Been there, done that, didn't get the answers that we really >>need because when we did the course we didn't know the >>right questions (as in '42'). From the original posting I really >>wanted to get a view as to how developers approach >>WebSpeed as in:
>>Do they ignore the WIzards and Templates and do their own thing
>>Do they use CGI Wrappers or HTML with speedscript for the majority of their work
>>and so forth.
<i>Most Progress shops trainging you in webspeed will not recommend using the wizards in webspeed. The appbuilder pro which I haven't used, is supposedly more robust, and I bet many webspeed develpers use these tools. The bad things about the wizards is the apps they create are limited, and the codemay be hard to modify. I have however, used the wizard code to generate a base query search page that I use as a template. Because of the lack of books, it was initially an easy way to do this, so the wizard stuff does have its uses. Eventually as you learn it, you may use different ways to develop with webspeed. When Progress mentions the wizards in webspeed, they really arent much at all.
Its funny, Many Progress folks come from a unix background, so there this pride thing about not using GUI apps or WYSWYG type apps to develop with webspeed. Thats probaly why the stuff I do see online looks and operates the way it does. The problem is that webspeed itself is really just notepad with a compiler. It is not really a robust development environement with strong tools. For example with ASP you have apps like Visual Interdev or Dreamweaver Ultradev (which works with Coldfusion and JSP as well), or with java/JSP you have rich development tools like Borland J Builder or Symantec Visual Cafe that integrate with popular html editors like Homesite or Dreamweaver. These are the cool trendy apps that are hot in the web development community. Most Progress folks probaly have never heard of these.
Webspeed and Progress is all you got. You can of course use any popular html editor. But it cant integrate (work within the webspeed environment or vice versa. Also code sniplets, beans. code exampes etc forget about it. This message board for example is not written with webspeed and running on a Progress database. Its using PHP and probaly a shareware script thats freely available all over the web. It can be modded and tweaked, and its probaly running on a MySQL database. You cannot find things like this available for webspeed. Sorry to rant on, but I know your frustration. I've been dealing with this for quite some time. You might want to check out Nusphere. It is a Progress company using MySQL. I Dont understand why Progress is doing all this cool stuff with Nusphere, but not with Progress.
