ODBC vs Webspeed for Webserver?

[Manic]

I have to develop a website for our company that will connect to a Progress database and I'm just starting my investigation on the best route to connect the webserver to the Progress dataserver/database, running on TRU64 Unix. I would like to use a Win2k server with IIS and ASP because that's what I'm most familiar with.

It looks like my two options thus far are: Use a third party ODBC driver from someone like Merant and use ASP to connect from my Win32 webserver as I normally would to any other database.

ANother option looks like (although not neccesarily ASP-friendly) that I can use webspeed.

My question is: What are pros/cons of using one method over another? Is one more scalable than the other? Am I going to give up some performance or speed by going with ODBC and SQL-92? will I be able to access any 4 GL code when I'm using ODBC? Is webspeed going to cost considerably more?

Any feedback from someone with experience in this area would be much appreciated!

 

[MurrayH]

1. You cannot access 4GL code from ODBC
2. Look at ProxyGen .. it allows you to convert 4GL procedures into ActiveX / Java objects .. very useful in VB etc.
3. ODBC is ok but still a little slow .. the necessity of using "pub.tablename" often seems to throw a lot of products off. You can get around this in the registry though I believe.
4.Webspeed does cost something but then so do ODBC licenses to the back end .. you better read VERY carefully the Progress license agreement!!

Murray

 

[Unregistered]

Unfortunately, you'll probaly have to use webspeed. Progress ODBC connectivity is a bit buggy or should I say indifferent. Its really sad, because it closes Progress off from a large resource of ODBC or JDBC connectivity apps. Thats why they branched off with Nusphere using MySQL for PHP. They just havent been able to create a good development tool and integrated platform with Progress.

I too have had to deal with webspeed coming from an ASP background. Worse than that no .NET or JSP.

The one good thing, however, is that webspeed is fairly easy to develop with once you get the hang of Progres 4GL. The bad side, is that you'll probaly not find one good helpful book with applicable demonstrations of using webspeed, and the resources available (components, activex, jsp whatever is extremely limited and non-existent for the webspeed platform.

Yeah Progress may seem cheap up front, but theres a lot of hidden costs, webspeed isnt cheap, and theres the cost of bad thrid party integration and limited resources.