Capabilities: RTF editing, Graphs, flat-file database

Richard Gaskin ambassador at fourthworld.com
Tue Jun 8 20:12:19 EDT 2004


jbv wrote:

 >>My WebMerge product is effectively a specialized RAM-based database. 
  >>It generates static HTML pages from the exported contents of nearly
 >> any database, spreadsheet, or other columnar data.
 >
 > Did you try to evaluate the "limits" of your app (or should I say
 > the approach of / way of handling data structure used in your app)
 > anyhow ?

I haven't done much stress testing, but thus far the engine has taken 
everything my customers can throw at it.

With modern VM being so efficient there's a lot to be said for RAM-based 
databases that wasn't true years ago in systems like Mac OS 9.

My favorite stress-test example (after the time I put the Bible into a 
single field):  One of my customers sent me a gzipped file that was 
about 70MBs.  Of course gzip is very efficient with text data, so I knew 
the resulting file would be fairly big.

But no problem for Rev running in OS X:  I used the built-in decompress 
function to read the 70MBs and the decompressed file was more than 
500MBs -- it took a while but worked flawlessly.

 > In case of using a flat-file database with Rev cgi (in a similar way
 > as WebMerge, that is HTML pages genetaed on-the-fly from HTML
 > templates and data stored as various txt files + indexes and loaded at
 > each cgi request), how does one manage security on the server for
 > those data files ? I mean : to prevent them from being hacked /
 > modified / downloaded by unauthorized users ?

In WebMerge's case, since it generates static web pages, the security 
considerations are no greater or lesser than for any web server.

With CGI there are some additional considerations.  For example, never 
write a Transcript CGI that allows the user to execute statements with 
"do". ;)

Chipp's been working a lot with CGIs lately -- Chipp, got any good 
security tips from what you've been working on?

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Media Corporation
  Developer of WebMerge: Publish any database on any Web site
  ___________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com       http://www.FourthWorld.com


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