It now seems a very long time ago, but last November I took part in a team meeting where we discussed how to evangelize Ingres within our own sphere of influence. Projects similar to the Playstation 3 port and the Eclipse DTP were mentioned as innovative. During the meeting I was asked to take a look at OpenLaszlo to try and modify one of their demonstration applications to use Ingres as a data source.
Being a tomcat, JSP and OpenLaszlo nubbie I managed to get the Amazon Store demo to use Ingres for the checkout and shipping address details. A couple of JSPs a two line change in OpenLaszlo source and the demo was reading data from Ingres. The code changes took 5 minutes, getting it to work took a little longer. I used OpenLaszlo 4.0.7 for my tests but OpenLaszlo 4.0.8 is now available.
Take a look at the OpenLaszlo source code at the line
<dataset name="dsAddressList" src="data/addresses.xml"/>
<dataset name="dsCreditCardList" src="data/creditcards.xml"/>
These were modified to
<dataset name="dsAddressList" src="/ingdb/getaddress.jsp" request="true" type="http"/>
<dataset name="dsCreditCardList" src="/ingdb/creditcard.jsp" request="true" type="http"/>
My initial pages and tomcat configuration is documented on the page “Accessing data from JSP” and contains the simple DDL for the table and some sample data. In this example the database and credentials are embedded in the page. With a little more time I changed the JSP to use the JSTL and configured the tomcat server with a JNDI resource for the database connection. My latest attempt is document on the page “JDBC and JNDI”.
For 2008 the watchword is “Rapid”. Rapid application development and deployment, everything has to happen faster. Using an environment like OpenLaszlo gets part of the way there.
We’ll be looking at subject matter for a development sprint at the forthcoming UK IUA in June. An OpenLaszlo application may be a candidate.
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