PVX Technologies

3 Ways to Get Your Applications to the Web

For most companies today, making your applications available via the Web is a given. It’s not a matter of whether you’ll do it, but when; Web accessibility is essential for long-term survival. The key is to have a game plan for how you will get there quickly and securely. Because users and their businesses are always changing, your Web project can’t take years or you run the risk of delivering technology that is obsolete by the time you have a product ready.

There are many ways to create Web-based applications, and many tools and methodologies for making them accessible, all of which have benefits and pitfalls. Choosing the right approach, even if it’s only an interim step, can be a daunting task.

PxPlus has a several options to get you on the Web. Let’s take a look at three approaches:

1. ProvideX/PxPlus Web Interface

ProvideX/PxPlus includes an easy-to-use interface for creating Web pages and parsing received Web form data. Originally, the core of the interface was a Web Server written in ProvideX that accepted the Web connections, parsed URL, and form input data, and then forwarded it to ProvideX/PxPlus application programs for processing.

Pros: This solution offered some immediate advantages. A couple of processes can handle a dozen users, in most cases. Web and desktop applications can share common non-UI code, and a wide range of Web applications can co-exist on a website. In addition, PxPlus improved performance by interfacing with Apache.

Cons: For developers moving existing applications to the Web, there was a catch: Most existing applications were designed not to be stateless. Thus, developers had to create new applications that were compatible with the Web Interface.

2. iNomads

From the very inception of the ProvideX/PxPlus Web Interface, PVX Plus Technologies realized its limitations, not in terms of what the interface could do, but because for most clients, the time and cost to re-design and re-develop applications to adhere to the stateless nature of the Web was prohibitive.

To meet the needs of clients who need to move a wide variety of existing applications to the Web, PVX Plus Technologies created iNomads.

Pros: iNomads provides a quick and easy way to deploy to the Web. The solution bridges the gap between stateless web pages and desktop applications, so there’s no need to redevelop graphical desktop applications.

Cons: The pages created in iNomads are not truly stateless. iNomads is a derivative of a desktop application, so end users can’t jump around the pages; they have to follow the flow of the underlying business application. In addition, each user ties up a process slot to enable the application to maintain its “state.” That means there’s a limit to the number of concurrent users who can be supported at once.

3. The best of both worlds!

The two options for developing Web applications with PxPlus — iNomads and the Web Interface — are not mutually exclusive. In fact, we often suggest that clients looking to move to the Web initially use iNomads to get the majority of their applications up and running on the Web quickly. Then, over time and as needed, they can deploy applications using the standard Web Interface, which provide the ability to better scale their applications and utilize a wide variety of Web-based components such as JQuery and AJAX.

What sets PxPlus apart from most other Web development toolsets is that NON-UI application code that is used in desktop applications can be shared and used in Web-deployed applications. This built-in efficiency can cut down on development cost and, most important, help ensure consistency between desktop applications and Web applications should you decide to deploy both.

PxPlus and common Web technologies

Regardless of the method you choose to move applications to the Web, PVX Plus Technologies continually adds and enhances the Web technologies that we provide within the PxPlus language itself.

Take a look at some examples of built-in Web technologies that come standard with PxPlus:

  • JSON and XML generation and parsing utilities
  • Web-request utilities comparable to “curl” and other Web-request submission routines
  • UTF8 support
  • Internal URL/HTML/BASE64/UUENCODE encoding/decoding functions
  • Web page generation and merge utilities to dynamically build pages
  • SSL support and access to encryption technologies
  • Direct PDF generation for viewing and uploading reports to the web

Why use PxPlus? Because as always, we protect your existing applications while providing pathways to the future.

[cta]Which Web-conversion method is best for you? At DireXions+ 2014, we’ll delve into each of these options in more detail to help you decide what will work best in your environment. Visit the DireXions+ 2014 website to register and get more information.

And contact us anytime you have questions. Simply email us at theplus@pvxplus.com or call 1-888-975-PLUS.[/cta]

PVX Plus Technologies