Hello,

I have a request to build a Web page, and underlying database to track
users on the net that want to log on to the site, and place an order
for the client's products, etc..

I have been studying Delphi for approx: 2 years, and have concentrated
for the most part in Database development.

Is CGI the method I need to learn? Can someone who has experience with
Delphi and the Internet in this way give me a basic outline or theory?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Rkr

Look at web hub http://www.href.com or...

You need to ask yourself a few questions.

   1) Do you expect many simultaneous users?
   2) What database are you using?
   3) What web server software will it be run on  (IIS, Website, etc)
   4) How big is the web server's machine?
   5) How good are you at debugging?

Why you'd ask these questions.

1) If you use win-cgi, the server will (createprocess) the CGI app.
If you've 50 simultaneous users, each will  have a seperate copy of
the CGI app running.

2) Which DB you use will delegate how many users you can support at a
time. I've been using MS Access and DAO without too many problems,
although, I'm not really sure how many simultaneous users it will
support.

3) If you use MSIIS or Website, you can just create regular console
apps. Really simple to do.

4) If the machine that the server's running on is borderline in size
(small pentium with minimal ram) you'll really bog it down with
regular and Win-cgi apps. On the other hand, ISAPI apps share address
space with the server, which cuts down on memory requirements and
speeds up the whole process.

5) If you create an in process DLL for ISAPI, you run the risk of
crashing the server if it's  not thoroughly debugged. If your win-cgi
program crashes, it's probably just going to take away some memory
until the server is rebooted.

Choices, choices...

JE McTaggart

In article <5i7vqk$...@news5.snfc21.pacbell.net>, rkro...@pacbell.net
says...

Hi Rkr,

You might want to take a look at CGI Expert. I think it could help you a
lot.

CGI Expert is a simple but powerful suite of components
for Delphi 2.0 to build applications that simultaneously
supports the CGI, win-CGI, ISAPI and NSAPI interfaces.

http://www.aait.com/cgiexpert/

..............................
Bernard Anstey - b...@aait.com      
..............................

You could try something like WebBase, a wannabee-Webserver with SQL in
your HTML code. It works with (they say) any ODBC driver.

I don't know how ODBC drivers use memory - maybe it depends on who
wrote it.

Webbase is at www.ExperTelligence.com, and they don't, AFAIK, give
away demo copies any more.

Hennie Mouton
Johannesburg
South Africa

If you are using Microsoft's Internet Server, you might check out the ISAPI DLL
examples at my Web site:

http://www.ionet.net/~hillt

They show how to access databases and create HTML documents on the fly.