The OpenEdge Hive

Are there free or cheap alternatives for webspeed?

Hypothetical Scenario:

Your company is licensed for 120 users using a Progress 8.3E database running on Unix/Linux, supporting 80 self-service character clients and 40 Windows users doing client-server. You do not own AppServer or WebSpeed. Your Web Server is Apache on Linux or IIS on Windows.

The company wishes to develop a small web-based application for internal-use only, available to all 120 users, but maybe averaging 0-100 hits per day. You are not convinced purchasing Progress WebSpeed makes sense economically.

You would like to develop and demo a website as inexpensively as possible. You realize that other tools exists such as PHP, MySQL, JSP, VB, or ASP via ODBC drivers, but you prefer to use the more familiar Progress 4GL and database technologies where reasonable.

You have one or more staff members with the following expertise available: 4GL-guru, Unix-guru, MCSE, HTML, JavaScript.

Answer

Note: Anyone is free to edit this FAQ, but PLEASE DO NOT USE THIS PAGE TO SELL/ADVERTISE. Links and comparative information are ok.

Please include:
* Name of product Webspeed-like product (include WebSpeed for compare).
* MINIMUM out-of-pocket cost to "go-live" (1 developer, 1 intranet user), and also to support say 50 internal users doing random access.
* Web link to product download site and/or email address for more information.

The baseline product from Progress is: WebSpeed - $5000 (min 5-AGENTS) An agent may represent > 1 users.
http:psdn.progress.com/library/webspeed/webspeed_products.htm

Here are some WebSpeed-like alternatives:

proCGI - free

ftp:ftp.progress.com/pub/ (not sure it's still available here)
An updated, simpler script suitable for Perl 5+, as well as
implementation tricks and tips is available from
http:www.newnhams.com. The script has been
successfully used for a number of small commercial applications.

Blue Diamond - free

(open-source, fee-based support available) http:ns1.amduus.com/OpenSrc/SrcLib/BlueDiamond/ Author: Scott Auge (sauge@amduus.com)

Ganimede - free

open-source GNU LGPL) - Author: Marian Edu (medu@crescendo.ro)

http:ganimede.possenet.org : Ganimede on PosseNet

http:sourceforge.net/projects/ganimede : Ganimede on SourceForge

http:news.tomescu.com : Ganimede & WsNewsKit Live

Carrier Wave - free

(open source) uses a lot of POSSE and FFW code,

Web site is hopelessly outdated, email author for information. Author: Tony Auerbach [mailto:tauerbach@austin.rr.com]

ChWP - free

(open-source GNU LGPL) - Author: Petr Vavrinec (peva@users.sourceforge.net)

http:chwp.sourceforge.net : ChWP on SourceForge

Iris - free

open source based on POSSE and FFW) http:www.tv.com.pl/iris Author: Tomasz Judycki (tjudycki@tv.com.pl)

Workgroup DB server is enough for deployment

High compatibility with Webspeed including HTML mapping (the same application could be deployed under Webspeed or under Iris)

Load balancing

Integrated with FFW

Tested under Windows and Linux

WebNss

Author: Claudemiro Pacheco (claudemirop@bol.com.br)

Tom Bascom's Named Pipes on Unix

described in the Linux DBA book
(ISBN 1-928994-04-0), starts a persistent session and listens on the pipe thus avoiding session start/stop overhead with each request. Works with any version of Progress 4gl back to v4 (maybe even v3).

Web4Each - (500)

http:www.foreach.nl/web4eachuk.htm