ASP.NET and jBASE

[Somz]

Hi,

I need to access jBASE from ASP.NET, how is it possible?

Regards
Somz

[Tony G]

Somz wrote:
> I need to access jBASE from ASP.NET, how is it possible?

There are a couple ways to do this but I'll provide my preferred solution.
;)

mv.NET is the best .NET connectivity component available for any MV
platform, jBASE included. My company, Nebula R&D, has entered into a
Distribution agreement to provide mv.NET and related support and services
to VARs and end-users.

The mv.NET product has three class libraries:
- Core Objects allows your VB.NET code or C# code to be written using
syntax which is familiar to jBASIC developers. It includes many functions
for logging in to jBASE, file IO, manipulation of dynamic arrays, working
with select lists, executing business rules in your jBASE application - and
a lot more.
- Adapter Objects provides full ADO.NET accessibility and is great for
non-MV developers who just want to use jBASE as a data source. mv.NET is
multi-value-aware and your data doesn't need to be flattened out. You can
also use it to provide direct access to files as a datasource for your
ASP.NET components.
- Binding Objects provides for easier binding to databound controls with
little or no coding. This can be used for rapid prototyping, inquiry
pages, or in combination with the other libraries where appropriate.

mv.NET v2.1 is now compliant with .NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005.

One of our goals is to help our VARs to develop and market their products.
jBASE professionals of Nebula Team1 are available to help with development
projects, and we are now offering training for all levels of .NET, mv.NET,
and jBASE usage and development.

For more info, see this page and related links:
http://removethisNebula-RnD.com/products/mvdotnet/mvdotnet.htm
We're re-organizing those pages and will add more content soon, please feel
free to ask for more details, documentation, and free evaluation licenses.

I hope that helps!
Tony Gravagno
Nebula R&D
TG@ removethisNebula-RnD.com

[Somz]

Hi,

Thanks for the info. How about jBASE OBjEX? I saw some information over
the net.
http://www.thetechtwo.com/detail-7756056.html

The jBASE site has the 'man' pages only, it doesn't say where it is
available.
http://www.jbaseintl.com/knowledgebase/manuals/3.0/30manpages/man/objex1.htm

where can find info on this? is OBjEX available for purchase?

Regards,
Somz

[Clif Bristol]

Isn't mv.NET a bit costly? Its basically 600 dollars per user because you have to have both a jBASE enterprise license for 300 and a mv.NET license for 300.

[Bob Markowitz]

Look out when a Sales guy jumps in again. Yes, the mv.NET runtime
session is about US$260 BUT since we use Management Pooling (sometime
called session pooling) you can get many connections per license. How
many connects you get per license depends on how you have written the
application.

Bob Markowitz
BlueFinity International
773/327-4443
www.bluefinity.com

[Clif Bristol]

Yes isn't that based on concurrent connections? If I have 5 concurrent connections then I will need 5 enterprise lic and 5 mv.NET lic.

-----Original Message-----
From: jB...@googlegroups.com [mailto:jB...@googlegroups.com]On Behalf Of

[John Lambert]

Somz,

I wrote OBjEX using DCOM (back in 1996) and to access it from .net
involves using the COM interchange layer. The layer imposes some
restrictions that cause limitations on subroutine parameter passing.
At the time DCOM was Microsoft's new 'way forward' for remote object
invocation but it soon became apparent that actually deploying a secure
DCOM application was a nightmare. One of the main goals of this part of
.NET was to make it practical in the real world.
So if you need remote access or are interested in actually deploying a
product, invest the money in MV.NET. If you are looking at something
local to your machine and don't need to call existing subroutines
without modification, then OBjEX can probably work for you. It's
included in the install.

John Lambert

PS I went to the .NET launching PDC and Don Box asked how many of the
5000 assembled developers had used COM (about 90%) , how many had used
DCOM ( about 30%) and how many had actually deployed an enterprise
application using DCOM. Three hands went up!

-----Original Message-----
From: jB...@googlegroups.com [mailto:jB...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf
Of Somz
Sent: Wednesday, November 16, 2005 2:24 AM
To: jBASE
Subject: Re: ASP.NET and jBASE [ad]

[Kevin Bilbee]

You can also look at jRCS. It is much cheaper but does not have the advance
features of mv.NET. We use it here and are happy with its performance.


Kevin Bilbee

> -----Original Message-----
> From: jB...@googlegroups.com [mailto:jB...@googlegroups.com]On Behalf Of

> Clif Bristol
> Sent: Wednesday, November 16, 2005 8:39 AM
> To: jB...@googlegroups.com
> Subject: RE: ASP.NET and jBASE [ad]
>
>
>

> Yes isn't that based on concurrent connections? If I have 5
> concurrent connections then I will need 5 enterprise lic and 5 mv.NET lic.
>

> -----Original Message-----
> From: jB...@googlegroups.com [mailto:jB...@googlegroups.com]On Behalf Of
> Bob Markowitz
> Sent: Wednesday, November 16, 2005 8:18 AM
> To: jBASE
> Subject: Re: ASP.NET and jBASE [ad]
>
>
>

> Look out when a Sales guy jumps in again. Yes, the mv.NET runtime
> session is about US$260 BUT since we use Management Pooling (sometime
> called session pooling) you can get many connections per license. How
> many connects you get per license depends on how you have written the
> application.
>
> Bob Markowitz
> BlueFinity International
> 773/327-4443
> www.bluefinity.com
>

> ---
> [This E-mail scanned for viruses by Declude Virus]
>
>
>

---
[This E-mail scanned for viruses by Declude Virus]

[Jim Idle]

OBjEX is fine for some things, but in this case I think that the
threading issues would get in your way. OBjEX is not thread safe on 3.x.

Jim

> -----Original Message-----
> From: jB...@googlegroups.com [mailto:jB...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf
Of
> Somz
> Sent: Wednesday, November 16, 2005 2:24 AM
> To: jBASE
> Subject: Re: ASP.NET and jBASE [ad]
>
>

[Jim Idle]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: jB...@googlegroups.com [mailto:jB...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf
Of

> John Lambert
>
> PS I went to the .NET launching PDC and Don Box asked how many of the
> 5000 assembled developers had used COM (about 90%) , how many had used
> DCOM ( about 30%) and how many had actually deployed an enterprise
> application using DCOM. Three hands went up!

Only because I put both hands up and you just the one ;-)

[Jim Idle]

You can also write your own custom code of course. This means that you
need such skills in house though.

Writing server programs that work off message queues presents an
orthogonal interface that divorces your code from bunches of issues.

Jim

> -----Original Message-----
> From: jB...@googlegroups.com [mailto:jB...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf
Of

> Kevin Bilbee
> Sent: Wednesday, November 16, 2005 9:02 AM
> To: jB...@googlegroups.com
> Subject: RE: ASP.NET and jBASE [ad]
>
>

> You can also look at jRCS. It is much cheaper but does not have the
> advance
> features of mv.NET. We use it here and are happy with its performance.
>
>
> Kevin Bilbee
>

> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: jB...@googlegroups.com [mailto:jB...@googlegroups.com]On
Behalf Of

> > Clif Bristol
> > Sent: Wednesday, November 16, 2005 8:39 AM
> > To: jB...@googlegroups.com
> > Subject: RE: ASP.NET and jBASE [ad]
> >
> >
> >
> > Yes isn't that based on concurrent connections? If I have 5
> > concurrent connections then I will need 5 enterprise lic and 5
mv.NET
> lic.
> >

> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: jB...@googlegroups.com [mailto:jB...@googlegroups.com]On
Behalf Of

> > Bob Markowitz
> > Sent: Wednesday, November 16, 2005 8:18 AM
> > To: jBASE
> > Subject: Re: ASP.NET and jBASE [ad]
> >
> >
> >

[Tony G]

This same question comes up whenever someone mentions a for-fee component -
"why pay when I can do it for free?" Yes there is a cost associated with
advanced components. We pay other people who make our jobs easier. One
could say there's no reason to use a DBMS at all - why not just store our
data in free tab-delimited files and parse the data ourselves with lots of
custom code? This discussion can go on for a long time and it never leads
anywhere. For those of us in this market who make a living selling
software or services it's especially difficult to maintain the argument
against for-fee components because ultimately people can ask why any of us
are charging for anything.

We have various tools available in our market, some do more than others -
the for-fee ones tend to do more than the free ones, or come with a better
package of services.
- In this case, the for-fee mv.NET has phenomenal support from BlueFinity,
and as a Distributor we try to provide the best tier-1 support experience
we can before taking issues to them. This can't be said with some of the
more static tools.
- mv.NET is constantly being improved - again this can't be said for the
static free tools.
- mv.NET integrates with Visual Studio .NET 2003 and now 2005 - this also
can't be said for any of the other tools except PDP.NET which isn't
available for jBASE.
- mv.NET has the three libraries that I mentioned in my prior post. That's
one product, three libraries, which means a consistent tool for doing
numerous jobs. You'll need to use various free tools for doing each of the
functions faciliated in mv.NET.
- mv.NET can be used by non-MV developers, people who have no experience
with jBASE. This is a great way to get new people involved with the
environment, and make management happy because it's a lot easier to find a
.NET developer than someone who knows OBjEX or jRCS.
- mv.NET was designed for use with .NET and doesn't require COM Interop
wrappers to make it work, which can be a real problem because most COM/DCOM
components simply weren't designed to work with .NET. There are reasons
for the existence of .NET including the elimination of DLL Hell, and by not
using the proper tools you're not going to derive all of the inherent
benefits.

From a business perspective, sure, our goal at Nebula R&D is to sell
licenses. We want to earn those sales by helping our VARs to succeed. We
do this by providing quality support and product information, access to
education, and assistance with development and marketing. You won't find
this sort of service coming from anyone else in our market, and you almost
certainly don't have a Distributor providing these resources for free
development tools. BTW, as a jBASE Distributor we're gearing up to provide
the same level of services to new jBASE VARs - and of course to end-users.

So yes there is a cost for mv.NET but it's worth it for many reasons as
we've seen in this discussion (including being thread-safe, multi-user
economy, etc). If you have any experience with .NET you'll especially
appreciate the product the more you use it. With a 30 day free evaluation
it can't hurt to give it a try. Contact me for more info or register for
an eval on the BlueFinity web site, and be sure to indicate that you heard
about mv.NET from Nebula R&D - this will ensure you work with us to get our
value-add benefits.

Thanks and Regards,
Tony Gravagno
Nebula Research and Development
TG@ removethisNebula-RnD.com

Clif Bristol wrote:
> Yes isn't that based on concurrent connections? If I have
> 5 concurrent connections then I will need 5 enterprise
> lic and 5 mv.NET lic.
>

[Clif Bristol]

Issue isn't that it cost something only that the cost is a bit high. When I told My management the price it was hard for them and for me to understand(and justify) a client piece of software costing as much as the jBASE license.

-----Original Message-----
From: jB...@googlegroups.com [mailto:jB...@googlegroups.com]On Behalf Of
Tony G
Sent: Wednesday, November 16, 2005 7:53 PM
To: jB...@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: ASP.NET and jBASE [ad]

[T.Turkington]

I'd say the cost associated with MV.Net is really a function of its
robustness. It does a lot of things; talks to numerous MVDBMS sources,
provides an ADO.NET interface, session management/pooling, brings your
database into the .net development environment, etc. The real question is
do you need everything it brings to the table; i.e. do you want a feast or
just a sandwich? When we were looking into using MV.Net, bluefinity did a
good job of giving us a web-seminar based demonstration of most of the
features. You might find such a seminar useful in determining how much of
the product you'll actually use.

Tom

[Clif Bristol]

I'm sure all this is true but marketing it at a price comparable to a jBASE license is putting the value on par with that of a jBASE license or on par with our application license and that simply isn't the case, at least with our customers. From a marketing standpoint it needs to get down to about $100 per user or have a developers version at a higher price($500) then a run time price of $25 to $50 per user.

This is just My feedback to you based on what I've seen. If your satisfied with the current sales of mv.net then great but if your not then you might want to consider my feedback.

[Kevin Bilbee]

I agree on the developer/runtime licensing pricing.

The cost of mv.NET is just too high to deploy to many clients.

Kevin Bilbee

[Jim Idle]

I think though they are suggesting that this is a per session price and
not a per user price and that you will certainly get more than one user
connected for that. If you can serve say 5 users, then you are at the
$00 per user price.

I feel their pain - I could not even get people to pay $1000 per server
for an automatic resizing file that would generally double the
performance of SELECT ;-).

Jim

[Clif Bristol]

Yes it is a per session use but we would need to buy enough licenses to cover worst scenarios. With web services we may only only have one or two concurrent hits every 5 min but a couple of times per day we may experience 10 to 15 concurrent hits. Its having to buy 10 to 15 licenses that the users will resist.

[Bob Markowitz]

That Mr. Idle is one very smart Gentleman! But we all know that even
though he once fired me.

If you get 5 users per one $260 license the cost is $52 per user. And
what if you get 10 users per license, then the cost $26 per user. It
is analogous to the way jBASE works over the web, kinda. It all comes
down to the cost of development and a developer can do an awful lot in
a very short time using mv.NET, Visual Studio and calls to legacy code.

Bob

[Clif Bristol]

With jBASE, at least 3.4 on W2K, there doesn't seem to be a limit on the number of connections using vb.net and oBjex. You just have to be aware that oBjex isn't thread safe.

-----Original Message-----
From: jB...@googlegroups.com [mailto:jB...@googlegroups.com]On Behalf Of

Bob Markowitz
Sent: Thursday, November 17, 2005 2:33 PM
To: jBASE
Subject: Re: ASP.NET and jBASE [ad]

[John Lambert]

Actually all the code in OBjEX is tread safe, its just the jBASE 3.x
code that it calls is not thread safe :)

But pretty much everything that OBjEX does calls the jBASE runtime...

John

-----Original Message-----
From: jB...@googlegroups.com [mailto:jB...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf

Of Clif Bristol
Sent: Thursday, November 17, 2005 2:38 PM
To: jB...@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: ASP.NET and jBASE [ad]

[Clif Bristol]

So are you saying OBjEX running on jBASE 4.1 will be thread safe?

[Tony G]

It's invalid to say that any given tool provides any specific number of
connections per license. This all depends on the application and not so
much on the tools. A user holding a READU lock should have exclusive
access to that license. If you hold such a lock from the time the user
logs in until the time they go home, your ratio is a very poor 1:1. If you
lock, update, and release during a brief transaction then you will get a
much better n:1 ratio. If you are doing inquiries where there are no locks
then your n:1 ratio is only limited to the amount of time consumed by the
actual transactions. Of course a faster CPU and network will increase your
user:license ratio too.

T

[Clif Bristol]

Are you saying a lic is only consumed during a read or write to the database and not just when its connected?

-----Original Message-----
From: jB...@googlegroups.com [mailto:jB...@googlegroups.com]On Behalf Of
Tony G
Sent: Thursday, November 17, 2005 4:26 PM
To: jB...@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: ASP.NET and jBASE [ad]

[Jim Idle]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: jB...@googlegroups.com [mailto:jB...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf
Of

> Bob Markowitz
>
> That Mr. Idle is one very smart Gentleman! But we all know that even
> though he once fired me.

Just the once? You're fired!

[Jim Idle]

Hmmmm. It was intended to be. Now, whether anyone continued with this
paln after John and I left is another question.

Jim

> -----Original Message-----
> From: jB...@googlegroups.com [mailto:jB...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf
Of

> Clif Bristol
> Sent: Thursday, November 17, 2005 4:16 PM
> To: jB...@googlegroups.com
> Subject: RE: ASP.NET and jBASE [ad]
>
>

[Stephen Bush]

A large number of "concurrent" hits can be processed serially by a few
pooled sessions surely with little noticeable delay to the users. Concurrent
processing shares the processor GHz so may be no faster than serial
processing anyway.

Steve

[T.Turkington]

Just to clarify, as you used the 2nd person pronoun in this response, I
and/or we really have no opinion about the sales of mv.net as t'is not our
product. We were actually looking at it as a solution for a client that
runs Universe. For them one of the benefits would be that session pooling
would somewhat offset the cost by reducing the number of Universe licenses
they'd need to purchase to service the application. Other than that, my
point here was that there were a number of other potential benefits to using
mv.net that would only have value if you actually used them. We have yet to
actually have a need for them, ergo have not purchased. (Seven months
later, our client is still thinking, (or perhaps has forgotten), about it.)

[Tony G]

mv.NET has a pooling mechanism with min/max license consumption. Users for
a given account can (not required) share the connections for that account.
Record locking and transaction bracketing require more persistence, so
ports for this purpose are not concurrently shared, but the ports are
re-used when a given user actually releases their session.

So a given lic is consumed over a long period of time, as long as the
session manager determines that it's required, and many users can have
access to that lic depending on the function required. The mechanisms are
very versatile to minimize the overhead of constant login/logout, or to
perform exactly as a telnet user would, with a real connect, login, logout,
disconnect and release of the lic.

Does that help?
T

Clif Bristol wrote:
> Are you saying a lic is only consumed during a read or
> write to the database and not just when its connected?
>

[Clif Bristol]

Thanks, that does help. Maybe its more feasible then I first thought.

-----Original Message-----
From: jB...@googlegroups.com [mailto:jB...@googlegroups.com]On Behalf Of
Tony G
Sent: Friday, November 18, 2005 3:21 PM
To: jB...@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: ASP.NET and jBASE [ad]