ncial Management Support. "We became disenchanted with the middleware issues. The middleware became a huge hurdle."
The university
now has a World Wide Web-based data-access, retrieval, and analysis system using no proprietary middleware. Instead, a Netscape Navigator front end supports Microsoft's Word and Excel going directly against Sybase data. The access method is in SybPerl (Sybase's dialect of the Perl scripting language) and Common Gateway Interface (CGI).
This alternative has turned out to be a cleaner implementation than middleware threatened to be. First, according to Walsh, developing the application without resolving proprietary middleware issues is faster.
More important to the university than speed, however, are the significant training and logistical support benefits of any application using the Web. "The world is educating people in the use of Netscape, so I don't have to," Walsh adds.
In addition, the Web solution is cheaper. Outfitting more than a thousand users with proprietary middleware would cost $75 to $150 a pop.
The university also avoids a major headache: software distribution. The s
ervices of the Web make it ideal to distribute new versions of the financial-information system.
Yet by far the biggest benefit is that the Web delivers information in a form that users can immediately use: rows and columns. More than 90 percent of what users request ends up in Excel spreadsheets. "That fact, more than anything else, pointed us toward the Web," Walsh recalls. "Our users didn't want table joining to yield all that denormalized data. All middleware implementations require extra steps to get data into spreadsheet form."
The Web-based decision-support system lets the university's financial analysts construct their queries by selecting fields and then clicking on the query icon. "The next thing they see is the result of their query populating the Excel spreadsheet, complete with column headings. They can start work right away analyzing the information. Users think it's fantastic," Walsh says.
What about the molasses performance of the Web? "Performance is a matter of perceptio
n and expectation," says Walsh. First, users expect the slow response typical of Web applications. Second, because the system removes layers of middleware, the actual performance is decent. "Combine the low expectation with the real performance, and you have a perceived performance that is pretty good," he says.
The Web server turns HTML-based forms from the Web Client into SQL queries that it then aims at the correct database server. The Web server formats the data returning from the database. The Web client browser calls up appropriate "viewers" (e.g., spreadsheets).
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Rejecting Middleware
