Mel's service program is a wonderful
enabler
for writing your RPG internet (CGI)
programs in the easiest way
while providing them
the maximum flexibility for maintenance.
This comes from two hard facts:
- you do not have to directly interface
the http APIs. These APIs are needed
to communicate with your AS/400 http server
and for asking some very basic funcions, such as
- receiving the remote browser request
- sending back the response html
or some other optional functions, such as
- editing a numeric field to be moved as a
character string into the
response html.
Using Mel's service program you access APIs
services thru simple calls to service module
procedures, thus reducing coding complexity
and by far the number of your tests.
- instead of having your CGI directly generating
the response html (as you may have been taught
in CGI classes, by storing pieces of html
on a database file),
you would be asking Mel's service program
to access an external text source member
or an external IFS stream file
containing all the possible response
html divided in record formats (sections)
and containing also variables.
This technique is conceptually similar
to that of using DDS for defining an external
display file, though its is much simpler
to learn and to implement.
As with DDS, you may then change the external
html without having to recompile your CGI program.
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