CGI Problem Solved [was Re: CGI Fiction Search Example]

[Gregory Lypny]

Hello Rick,

I haven't tried it yet, but my gut feel on tokens is that they 
shouldn't be any more cumbersome than in FileMaker.  In FM, if you 
haven't assigned user names and passwords to your clients, you have to 
use tokens to track them, and that means inserting a token tag in every 
html page they might visit.  I figure that tokens can be handled in 
Revolution through a log-in or sign up stack that has some personal 
identification, such as a serial number that can be passed to each 
page.

My disappointment with FM, as I've expressed previously on this list, 
is that it is expensive (I can't afford to dish out another $1,500, or 
whatever the amount, to upgrade from Unlimited to Server Advanced) and, 
more importantly, the inflexibility of its scripting.  I've been 
tinkering with 4D and finding it quite powerful, but also discovering 
that the learning curve is steeper than it ought to be.  I always find 
myself coming back to Revolution or MetaCard.  I'll let you know when 
I've completed my first web-based Revolution project.  Perhaps some of 
you may want to critique it.

While I'm here, I do have another question for anyone out there with 
Revolution cgi experience, and this concerns the speed with which a 
Revolution cgi returns a result the first time it is called by a 
client.  My first search of Fiction Search takes a long time, say, 
thirty seconds, to return a page of hits.  Subsequent searches are 
completed in the blink of an eye.  Is this a client-side or server-side 
thing?  In other words, will all visitors to my projects experience a 
potentially confusing slow first response, or is it just a matter of me 
somehow priming or loading the Revolution engine into memory on my 
server in advance, so that it's ready for visitors?


	Gregory
	__________________________
	Associate Professor of Finance
	John Molson School of Business
	Concordia University
	Montreal, Quebec
	Canada


On Sep 6, 2004, at 12:00 PM, use-revolution-request at lists.runrev.com 
wrote:

> On Sep 5, 2004, at 5:49 PM, Gregory Lypny wrote:
>>
>> ...
>> The cgi appears to run faster than FileMaker.  Very cool.  Now, in my
>> upcoming projects, I will have to develop something akin to tokens and
>> handlers that can generate html tables dynamically, perhaps based on
>> GoLive templates.
>> ...
>
> Gregory,
>
> If you ever get tokens and handlers to work, let me know.
>
> I have a lot of FileMaker Pro/Lasso 7 code that I'd dump in a quick
> minute
> if the Revolution CGI stuff were totally up to the task.
>
> Good luck and keep plugging away!
>
> Rick Harrison