15. PostgreSQL 4GL for web database applications - AppGEN Development System

AppGEN can be downloaded from

http://www.man.ac.uk/~whaley/ag/appgen.html

ftp://ftp.mcc.ac.uk/pub/linux/ALPHA/AppGEN.

Extract from the home page of AppGEN is given below:-

AppGEN is a high level fourth generation language and application generator for producing World Wide Web (WWW) based applications. These applications are typically used over the internet or within a corporate intranet. AppGEN applications are implemented as C scripts conforming to the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) standard supported by most Web Servers.

To use AppGEN you will need the following :-

PostgresSQL, relational database management system

A CGI compatible web server such as NCSA's HTTPD

An ansi C compiler such as GCC

AppGEN consists of the following Unix (Linux) executables :-

• defgen, which produces a basic template application from a logical data structure. The applications are capable of adding, updating, deleting and searching for records within the database whilst automatically maintaining referential integrity.
• appgen, the AppGEN compiler which compiles the appgen source code into CGI executable C source and HTML formatted documents ready for deployment on a web server.
• dbf2sql, a utility fo converting dBase III compatible .dbf files into executable SQL scripts. This enables data stored in most DOS/Windows based database packages to be migrated to a SQL server such as PostgresSQL.
• In addition, AppGEN comprises of a collection of HTML documents, GIF files and Java applets which are used at runtime by the system. And of course, like all good software, the full source code is included.

The author, Andrew Whaley, can be contacted on andrew@arthur.smuht.nwest.nhs.uk and would appreciate any comments or suggestions about the software.