[Xitami] somebody using visual basic out there?

[Paul Reid]

>  i started writing cgi with visual basic

I would have expected you to get razzed on that point: "You
program in BASIC? Yuck!", rather than the non-unix point. Even
FORTRAN gets more respect than BASIC. 

I'd argue that *nix is NOT universally "more stable"... but this
isn't the place. 

Using MS Basic "prevents" you from porting to non-MS platforms,
which isn't much of an issue for me. I have stable MS machines.
If I had to move to a commercial hosting site, most assume unix
but plenty of NT hosts are available. 

Yes, I too program in BASIC, when nobody is watching. I have a VB
filter serving many pages on my site from a database. And because
I am a really crude guy, I also have a QuickBasic 4.5 (1985 DOS
tool) CGI handling forms. Hey: it works, I understand it; what
more could I want? 

>From one Basic-user to another: once you get over Perl's chaos,
it ain't as bad as it looks. I have 21 years experience in BASIC,
I spent a month part-time writing my VB filter. After a month of
poking at Perl trying to get a handle on it, I did more in one
day than I did in a month with VB. Some things are still better
in VB-- nobody's string functions compare with MS BASIC. But many
things web-related are pre-made in Perl. 

>  the object code was some 120 kB, but when using only the 
needed statements the object code is only 15..25k

One think I learned in years of QB programming, and the same is
true in VB: the object code size is meaningless. The compiler is
pretty sloppy. Much of that "excess" code won't be used. And even
more so in VB, where ANY program loads and initializes a 2 Meg
library, which dwarfs the code you or I will write. (Perl does
the same thing, only differently.) If your code reads better with
(or without) some function or module, do it regardless of how big
the BIN or EXE file comes out. 

>  It can search through 12000 records, send e-mail and faxes and generate output in less than a second.

My VB filter does a very dumb sequential search on a flat text
file and can pull 1,000 hits in less than a second on P-350. Some
things in VB are slow (case-sensitive text match) but most things
are bound by disk and network speed, not program speed. A rough
comparison with old QB45 (which ran well on 8088-5 machines)
shows little difference. 

Your question may be about VB but it probably is really about CGI
or Xitami's interface to CGI, which IS on-point on this list. 

>  can't get any file download done. When checking the files on the server just after a download i don't find any file 

Without details of what you mean "download" I can't begin to
think where to look. Do you really mean "upload"? What HTML code
do you use in the form? Does your VB code believe it has handled
a file? 

> Xitami even parses the form fields so i don't have to do it myself!

Yes, but MultiPartEncoded is a bit tricky. 

This is one place where I'd be inclined to use Perl. BASIC/VB's
notion of STDIN and STDOUT is a bit arcane... well to be frank,
it isn't like unix and CGI assumes that kind of input stream.
Perl has modules, or you can find pre-made File UpLoad Perl
scripts. Since form-upload really does not have to interface
directly with your VB code, it should not interfere. 

And BTW: I would have written that VB filter in QB; in fact I
prototyped it in QB. The thing that "forced" me to VB is QB45's
64K limit on string-space. I could have worked-around, but I was
attracted to the "infinite" heap in VB-Win. 

 -PRR