MERANT Micro Focus Server Express™

Internet Applications

MERANT™

Issue 1
January 1999

MERANT has made every effort to ensure that this manual is correct and accurate but reserves the right to make changes without notice at its sole discretion at any time.

The software described in this document is supplied under a license and may be used or copied only in accordance with the terms of such license, and in particular any warranty of fitness of MERANT software products for any particular purpose is expressly excluded and in no event will MERANT be liable for any consequential losses.

Micro Focus® is a registered trademark, and MERANT™, Object COBOL™ and Server Express™ are trademarks of MERANT International Limited.

Netscape™ and Netscape Navigator™ are trademarks of Netscape Communications Corporation.

UNIX® is a registered trademark of X/Open Company Limited.

Copyright© 1999 MERANT International Limited
All Rights Reserved.

Preface

This book describes how you can create and debug Internet Applications using Server Express.

Audience

This book is aimed at COBOL programmers who want to write applications to run on the Internet or their organization's intranet. You don't need to be an expert on the Intranet or intranet to use this book, although you will find it is easier to understand the concepts in here if you have spent some time using Web browsers to navigate either the World-Wide Web or your organization's own intranet.

How to Use this Book

To understand the basic concepts used throughout the rest of the book, read chapter 1.

To learn how to create applications read chapters 2, 3 and 4. Chapter 2 describes forms, Chapter 3 describes server-side programming, and chapter 4 describes how to compile and link an Internet application.

To turn a standard CGI program into a NSAPI application by recompiling it, read chapter 5. Skip this chapter if you aren't interested in NSAPI.

When you finally want to deploy your application on a Web server, read chapter 6.

Notation

The following type styles and conventions have been used in this book:

• Text that you type is shown like this:

  cat script_name | more

  The italic text denotes a variable that you type as part of the command.

• Text in command lines or code examples that is optional is shown in square brackets. In the following example, the expression can specify that the column_name is like the pattern_value, or is not like the pattern_value, depending on the absence or presence of the optional word NOT:

  column_name [NOT] LIKE pattern_value

• Sections or paragraphs that apply only to a particular model or operating system are identified by a bold italic heading immediately preceding the paragraph it applies to. For example:

  AIX
  This paragraph only applies on AIX systems.