programming a simpol server

[Jim Locker]

One of the primary advantages of superbase with ppcs was that I could program the server as required for my job. .. Specifically, I learned very quickly that when I needed the results of a large query, or a specific subset of a database returned, if I wanted acceptable performance given internet network latencies, I needed to send a query to the server, have the server construct a tailored dataset, then send that dataset back to me. In fact, I generally would write that dataset to a .sbf file with necessary indexes, zip the whole thing up, and ship it. Worked quite well. .. I’m looking at the simpol ppcs server provided, and I see no way to program it. Is there one? If not, this is not likely to work well over the internet for any but the simplest of things, though it will be just fine on a LAN that has low latency. .. Also, I notice a bzip2.dll in the directory with the server. The server is using compression?

[Michael]

On 26/08/2013 16:59, Jim wrote:
> One of the primary advantages of superbase with ppcs was that I could
> program the server as required for my job.
> ..
> Specifically, I learned very quickly that when I needed the results of a
> large query, or a specific subset of a database returned, if I wanted
> acceptable performance given internet network latencies, I needed to send
> a query to the server, have the server construct a tailored dataset, then
> send that dataset back to me. In fact, I generally would write that
> dataset to a .sbf file with necessary indexes, zip the whole thing up, and
> ship it. Worked quite well.
> ..
> I'm looking at the simpol ppcs server provided, and I see no way to
> program it. Is there one? If not, this is not likely to work well over
> the internet for any but the simplest of things, though it will be just
> fine on a LAN that has low latency.
> ..
> Also, I notice a bzip2.dll in the directory with the server. The server
> is using compression?
>

Hi Jim,

You can certainly program your own PPCS server. That is all ours is, is a SIMPOL program using the PPSR components. All of this is
documented in the language reference, though there isn't any documentation in the guides.

You can do quite a lot with the server component, I just haven't had the time yet. One of my customers has an all-singing,
all-dancing PPCS server that he can send commands to and have it add, modify, and delete fields, create indexes, reorganize
tables, etc. I have plans to add that to our server and to split the GUI front-end out and run the actual server as a service.

As for the bzip2.dll, that is used for doing compression for the backup module. There is a library I distribute that will create
simple archives (single directory only) that are a collection of bzipped files (bzip is a file compression package, not an
archiving package). It stores the file names and date time info and restores that on unpacking.

Ciao, Neil

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