HTML gurus - is this possible / easy ?

[Valhalla1]

I'm sort of in charge of our datacenters web site, on which we publish jpg graphs of the last 9 or so months of service statistics for our customers (bar/line graphs of uptime, response time, etc.)

anyway its embarassingly low-tech how we update them - there are jobs on the mainframes which generate the statistic numbers, which are sent to a dataset (kind of like a file on a windows or unix machine) which is sent to the mainframe printer. someone then by hand enters the numbers into excel and creates the graphs which I then take screen shots of and make jpgs out of them to publish.

there has go to be a way to say, once a month have the web server generate the graphs by pulling the #'s off the dataset output from the mainframe and creating the jpgs and storing them on the server for that month, then updating them on the 1st of the next month or whatever.

I have never made non-static html (ASP, php3, etc.) so where would I start on learning how I can do this to streamline this process? its time consuming and wasteful.


another issue - the web server is running off a "virtual" unix environment through a started mainframe OS/390 task on our datacenter's mainframe partition. so its not your standard apache or IIS, I assume this will cause major problems? perhaps I'll have to convince my mainframe-oriented manager that perhaps a pc based web server would be better for our needs?

 

[pulpp]

shouldnt be too hard to do, if you can say get the numbers into some format like comma delimited text files, then using a php or perl script you can generate graphs directly from those numbers, the idea is that the script would read the numbers then using small images multiply how many times the image is displayed by the number it reads, thus giving the effect of a chart, sorta of like in polls here, i am sure if you search hotscripts.com you will find something that already does that or if not, something that you can modify to do what you want.

 

[ggavinmoss]

Yeah, I don't know about PERL, but PHP has a good range of image manipulation functions -- so it shouldn't be too hard.

-geoff

 

[Valhalla1]

I see.. I will check it out. my question -



<< , if you can say get the numbers into some format like comma delimited text files >>



is how to go about doing this.. the data coming from the mainframe is funky and scripts won't like it I'm afraid.. not ASCII, its ebsidic or whatever the other format is

 

[Valhalla1]

also I don't know how possible it is to run php on this mainframe server

 

[Czar]

Yeah, php is the best way to go,
http://www.webmasterbase.com/article.php?aid=228&amp;pid=0

Great tutorial to start with.

 

[Czar]

What type of web server is running on the mainframe?

 

[pulpp]

hmm... there are command line tools to convert from EBSIDIC to ASCII if i remember right, from there you can use something grep and regular expression to extract the data then inject it into a clean file that the script will read from

 

[Valhalla1]

Lotus Domino &quot;webgo&quot; or something like that..

running under IBM Unix system services for OS/390 (virtual unix environment running under mainframe OS)

 

[Valhalla1]

<< hmm... there are command line tools to convert from EBSIDIC to ASCII if i remember right, from there you can use something grep and regular expression to extract the data then inject it into a clean file that the script will read from >>



okay, so a unix command line utility to convert the output file to ascii, then extract the data with grep and output to another file, which PHP uses to generate graphs - on the fly? every time someone accesses the graphs? I can't have the web server taking a lot of mainframe CPU time , thats why I was thinking it could create them just once a month

 

[Valhalla1]

dp

 

[lamplighter]

PHP and store the data in MySQL database.

 

[Valhalla1]

whew.. looks like I've got some products to learn then because I know diddly about SQL or PHP

 

[cmv]

Lotus Domino Webgo is apache with other stuff... You should double check this but IBM &amp; Lotus have started to use Apache in some of their products! Hit groups.google.com and search for answers.

 

[Czar]

sql is easy, php is harder, still easy, you can just do so much with php that it will take some time to learn

 

[Valhalla1]

<< Lotus Domino Webgo is apache with other stuff... You should double check this but IBM &amp; Lotus have started to use Apache in some of their products! Hit groups.google.com and search for answers >>




interesting.. so theoretically if the server is setup correctly I should be able to run PHP, since webgo is just apache?

 

[Valhalla1]

and I still have issues with creating the charts on the fly - this is a low-traffic server but cpu usage is important..

 

[perry]

I'm 98% certain that PHP can be run from the command line. So you could setup a cron job (or however that mainframe schedules tasks) to run at the start of each month and dump the output into a HTML file. That is, if you can get PHP to run on it. Otherwise, a cheapo Duron with Linux on it could run as a webserver, pulling the data from the mainframe every month. Don't ask me how you'd go about doing that, just tossing out ideas.

 

[Valhalla1]

hrm.. well I like the idea that its certainly possible, so I'll see what the boss man says about letting me spend some company hours trying to set this up

 

[Valhalla1]

maybe I could have a PC based web server for just the service statistics pages, running linux with PHP, and have the mainframe webserver load up just the stats pages from the linux box...

hrm..