************************************* * * * DB/C Newsletter * * January 1997 * * * ************************************* Editor's Notes Beta testing of both FSS 1.0 and DB/C 9.1 is progressing well. The release of both products should happen by the end of January. Check the DB/C WWW page later in January for details (www.swc.com/dbc.html). In addition to offering the DB/C classes in Oak Brook, we are probably going to offer the same classes electronically on CD-ROM or video tape. If you have any suggestions about what we should include in the classes or in what form these should be produced, I would like to hear from you. We expect the first of these to be available by April 1997. If you don't already have the DB/C Newsletter delivered to your email address and would like to have it emailed to you once a month, just send an email message to 'majordomo@swc.com' and put the line 'subscribe dbcnews' in the body of the email message (omit the ' characters). The newsletter will be delivered to the email address from which the message was sent. Several people have asked if it is possible to write WWW interface programs in DB/C. The answer is yes and this month's article describes how to do it. If you put a DB/C WWW interface into production, let me know. We would like to share such interesting success stories with the readers of this newsletter. don.wills@swc.com DB/C and CGI The WWW is now mainstream. Wherever you look today in newspapers, in television advertising, and in many other surprising places, you will find WWW page addresses. The purpose of these WWW pages may be advertising, information, commerce or fun. Whatever the purpose, they are everywhere. Many of these WWW pages are becoming more than just passive advertising or information pages - they are interactive. These interactive pages usually have one or more fields that need to be filled out, and then you press a submit or OK button to send the data to the WWW server. The server then responds with a data screen or an appropriate response. This interaction is similar to traditional data entry processing. The Common Gateway Interface (CGI) is the most widely used standard for processing the information that is submitted from interactive WWW pages. It is a fairly simple standard that was originally designed for UNIX, but has been adapted to other WWW server operating systems. Detailed information about the CGI standard can be found at: http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/CGI/Overview.html A good introductory book about CGI is 'CGI Programming in C & Perl' by Thomas Boutell (Addison Wesley). In this article, we won't go into all of the details of CGI, but we will provide enough information to get you started using DB/C with CGI. To illustrate DB/C and CGI, we will use a simple example that tests to see if a number is prime. This user inputs a number that is sent to the WWW server. The WWW server responds by telling the user whether that number is prime or not. If you want to see this example running, goto this WWW page: http://www.swc.com/prime.html Just fill in the field with a number and click on the Test button. The Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) is the special language that is used to specify the format of a WWW page. HTML is the output of the various WWW authoring tools like Microsoft Frontpage. By using a tool like Frontpage, you don't actually need to learn HTML. You can also create a WWW page directly with a text editor by just embedding the HTML tags. Here is the complete 'prime.html' file used in our example: