RE: Another Flex/VMS example - Browsing the ACCOUNTNG.DAT file

I'm curious as to what code you added. I had a quick look at the dashboard
example and the Datagrid, ArrayCollection and Array classes and couldn't
see
...

I used the code Phil posted on
http://flextricks.wordpress.com/2007/02/03/sorting-numeric-values-in-a-flex-
datagrid/ then added sortCompareFunction="sortCompareFunc" to every data
column that I wanted to sort numerically.

...
I re-read this in your original post and have to say I'm impressed! Any
idea
of the ratio between data and metadata? Any issues, concerns here?

The .XML file for 4100 records was 4.77 MB, if I take all the XML code then
the actual data is 1.42 MB. So there is a lot of overhead but using XML was
an easy way for me to get the data without a lot of programming or learning.
This whole thing took about 4 days of work spread over three months with
absolutely no knowledge of Flex at the start. (OK, to be honest I still have
almost no knowledge of Flex, but I can cut/paste examples :) ).


Does your VMS Flex compiler have the qualifier for production -vs- debug
versions of the SWF? With FlexBuilder I was getting ~50% size reduction
with
the production export.

I think that is an added feature in Flex Builder, but I may be wrong on
that. A quick look at the command line options doesn't show anything about
debug/production compiling.


was testing this using a file with over 4,000 records and it took
30 or 40 seconds to load on my LAN.

I'd imagine if the file contained a lot more than 4K records or the user's
selection criteria went a bit skew-whiff then it might be worth while
having
some cancel/abort functionality, or maybe start delivering the
rows/records
one at a time so that an certain amount of parallelism could be achieved
with the Flex/Javascript enriching the data on the client while the server
pumps out the data? Perhaps a record-count so the user could see what
they're up to? Sound familiar :-)

Sounds like a nice enhancement, maybe the next time I feel like playing with
this.

Recently I was talking to a potential customer about managing
their system. When the request started going up the management chain
someone
above said that the plan was to shutdown the VMS system because VMS is
text
based and can not be used by a browser :(.

To be fair to your customer, he does seem to have the facts on his side
and
those facts aren't all that historical :-( How many GUIs have you seen
front-ending VMS applications (browser-based *or* stand-alone)? With the
last ten years of VMS middleware development effort going into
Bridgeworks,
SOAP/Toolkit, WSIT, AXIS2, gSOAP, a.n.otherSlushFund, there simply hasn't
been the funding for anything worthwhile and most tragically, the
opportunity-cost has been enormous. And yet customers are still screaming
out for someway, anyway to put a GUI on (and/or web-enable) their VMS 3GL
applications :-(

Right, management keeps complaining that their VMS apps are too old
fashioned, programmers scramble to learn new technology so they can get new
jobs programming PC applications but nobody thinks of applying these new
technologies to their old VMS apps.

You like the pure Flex/WASD|Apache/Perl|PHY|Python|Ruby strategy, and so
will many others, it's a broad church and I don't see why pluralism can't
play it's part, just as long as VMS is the winner. Once again well done!

I also like PHP. I run Ilohamail on my system so I can get to my mail via
the web. I also have a family genealogy file that started life on a Rainbow
using a DECUS program then was migrated to a Windows PC running Family Tree
Maker but now lives on VMS using PHPGEDView so anyone in my extended family
can add/update information via the web. I have another half dozen PHP
packages that I have installed that I got running but then lost interest in.

Peter Weaver
www.weaverconsulting.ca www.openvmsvirtualization.com
www.vaxvirtualization.com www.alphavirtualization.com


.

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