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Conference ucrow::desktop_acms

Title:	DECtp Desktop for ACMS

Moderator:	UCROW::GIBSON

Created:	Mon Sep 24 1990
Last Modified:	Fri Jun 06 1997
Last Successful Update:	Fri Jun 06 1997
Number of topics:	859
Total number of notes:	3034

837.0. "ACMS on NT4/intel question??" by JGO::jgomond1.jgo.dec.com::MOND () Wed Apr 02 1997 12:28

Hello, 

I am  currently in the process of developing an internal Web application on 
MS Internet Information Server running on NT4/Intel which should 
communicate with a VAX/VMS application using ACMS.

The idea is the following:

From within IIS / Active Server (and possibly C/C++ or VB4) we want to make 
ACMS calls to the VAX/VMS application and the returned data should be 
processed to HTML output.

I have the following questions:

* Can I do this with ACMS desktop? If so, are there any examples / 
experiences that I can share? Or should I use ACMS xp for this?

* If so, can I download the kit internally? The project is internal only.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Kind regards,
 
    Guus van de Mond.

T.R	Title	User	Date	Lines
837.1		UCROW::GIBSON	`Thu Apr 03 1997 16:09`	37
	Hello Guuss, I do not know of any IIS based kit for ACMS Desktop/ACMS to give you a pointer. We have not done anything yet with IIS. Customers might have, I know of customers using NSAPI and CGI interfaces with ACMS Desktop. Right now I think you are on your own unless someone else knows of some site or other effort underway. If you are already using ACMS Desktop clients you know the main thing to watch out for is that the API is not thread safe. If you use the ACMSDI API you will probably wind up writing a DLL that in turn calls the ACMS Desktop DLL to make the call into ACMS. While your DLL that IIS calls can be multithreaded you will need to protect the call into the ACMS Desktop DLL with some kind of a lock to only allow one thread at a time to be in the ACMSDI DLL. You can have multiple task call requests outstanding to the backend, just don't let more than one thread be executing in the acmsdi.DLL at a time. Exchange I/O seems tricky and if used in an application it might be easier to break up the application into tasks that do not do exchange I/O rather than to try and program around it in the web server. If you do have the option of rewriting your backend application and changing over to ACMSxp, there is already a project underway to provide IIS interfacing directly into ACMSxp task servers. I expect the ACMSxp group would be very interested in an internal field test site. The ACMSxp web interfacing project is scheduled be completed in the next quarter or so. If you do decide to stay with ACMS and roll your own IIS calls into the ACMSDI API, we would be interested in providing any off-line assistance we can with the interfacing. In a little longer time frame (and I don't know what that means, perhaps weeks rather than months) there should be something similar started for ACMS as for ACMSxp to provide more intergrated web interfacing support. One of the first things we will have to consider is a multithreaded client interface. /Tom
837.2	Re:	JGO::jgomond1.jgo.dec.com::MOND	`Tue Apr 08 1997 09:10`	12
	Hello Tom, Thanks for your help. For the moment, we try to do what we want with ACMS desktop. Dealing with the threading is something that we should solve during programming. We'll keep you informed on our progress (and problems). Kind regards, Guus.