Let's go through a brief history of moving to the web through our eyes. Of course, we only used Unidata back then. U2logic was a VAR for Unidata the company. Nearly 100% of the work we did back then was to maintain Telnet applications (green screen) and enhance them. Today 100% percent of our work is Web-based application development.
We starting looking at going to the web in the late 1990s. There was not much in the way of tools or technique. It was tough to get any traction until we found an ISP that would host our site. We created the site using HTML and a little JavaScript. By the way. Cascading Style Sheets was just invented and we could not figure it out so we embedded style in the HTML. We had a CGI interface. We read information from a flat file and posted it from our database to the web and read back the data to our database.
We found Redback back around 1999. Redback only ran on Internet Explorer version 4 using the Microsoft web server. The Redback code was kludgy and our code was even worse. Nonetheless, we starting learning how to talk to the Web and how clients would react to entering data and running reports.
Shortly thereafter Unidata replaced Redback with Redback Open containing Redback Objects (RBO). This time we had an executable that we could talk to our database. RBO’s were a major step up when communicating with our database. Nonetheless, the problem was all of the code we created with Redback we had to throw away. The two systems were not compatible. Well, that did not stop us. We converted most of our applications to Redback RBO's.
There were a few severe problems with Redback RBO’s. Redback required us to restart our Microsoft web server at least once a week or it would just stop working. We had to run a manual purge to clean up temporary files that Redback created because the Redback garbage collect did not delete all of the files and would continually slow down.
One of U2logic's staff suggested we write our own middleware to solve Redback’s issues. We thought the idea was crazy, but what the heck. Though and behold around 2006 we created U2WebLink which supported Unidata and Universe. This software used the same ideas as Redback's RBO. U2Weblink middleware which was written in Java ran using UniObject for Java and Apache Tomcat as the webserver. We got to keep most of UniBasic code, HTML, and JavaScript a very surprising fact for us all.
Today we are still using U2WebLink. The current version runs on Java 15 and Apache Tomcat 10. Moreover, U2Weblink supports an open-source reporting tool call BIRT from Eclipse.org that can produce PDF, HTML, DOCX, and XLSX output. We developed an API that allows us to call UniBasic Subroutines without creating an object for interface purposes. U2Weblink is highly scalable and has been tested with up to 15000 users. Since we built our monitoring system from within it does not take up any noticeable resource and gives you a picture of how the system is running. We stopped trying to develop our own JavaScript library routines back in 2008. Currently, we use a JavaScript library called Webix.
