Application World: The Rube Goldberg Device

HTML over HTTP

• CGI/Servlet calls programmatic API and returns HTML
• Sneaking past firewalls
• Data in via POSTed binary data or encoded-forms or query args
• Data out as HTML
• "Screen-scraping" as an API mechanism
• Cheap, easy, and quick

And Now, The Bad News

• Not robust or reliable: change appearance of page and it breaks!
• No consistency from application to application
• Scalability issues
• No transaction support
• Sneaking past firewalls isn't a good thing, actually

14

Copyright (c) 2001 Mary Holstege
All rights reserved.