0

We have a traditional VB application which are used for Organization operations. Now we are building a Hybrid application developed by using HTML5,CSS and Javascript which is targeted on Google Chromium desktop container. Now we are planning to provide a way to exchange large data like employees records between both of these 2 applications. Now my specific question is

What are the different ways to achieve communication between Chromium desktop container and VB application to exchange large chunks of data?

Babu
  • 285
  • 1
  • 4
  • 15

1 Answers1

0

Sounds a bit painful no matter what.

Chrome Apps Architecture

All external processes are isolated from the app.

This would seem to suggest the obvious course is to use cloud data services, whether on public or private clouds.

I suspect that for political as well as practical reasons no cloud vendor goes to the trouble to provide VB/VBA-friendly APIs for their services. Mainly nobody wants to deal with support issues from the teeming hordes of casual coders the VB community is saddled with.

The VB6 community hasn't stepped up and taken care of this themselves either.

If you can limp along with the burdens of ".Net Inter Clop" (the usual MS answer) that might be a way to exploit existing API implementations.

Otherwise you might roll your own cloud. I see a few obvious services you'd want to implement in your cloud with lightweight APIs easily implemented in both of your development ecosystems:

  • Bulk Storage. I suggest WebDAV, which IIS supports. If you eschew the locking features then WebDAV API implementations are pretty easy in both JS and VB. Or buy (or scrounge open source) implementations of a more complete WebDAV client library.
  • DBMS. Pick any, implement a simple REST-like XML over HTTP API. Relatively easy to implement.
  • Push Notifications. I'd write a custom service accepting long-duration TCP connections from all clients, and with protocols and workflow à la Amazon SNS or Google Cloud Messaging. Such a service would be generally light in resource consumption but you'd probably want a dedicated box with OS tweaks to support a large number of active TCP connections.
  • Maybe optionally a message queue service?

Nothing novel here, these are all well established patterns.

All of the tools to do that are pretty off-the-shelf whether you want your cloud servers to be based on Windows, Linux, or generically Java anywhere.

Most of the effort will probably go into developing a consistent authentication model, access control model, and of course an integrated administration interface, monitoring, and logging to help keep operating overhead low and uptime high. Well, that and developer docs and training.

Ok, still a lot of work. Too bad there isn't a "cloud in the box" with the API libraries you'd need that you can buy off the shelf today.

Or perhaps I'm missing something obvious?

Bob77
  • 13,167
  • 1
  • 29
  • 37
  • I like to think I'm not a part of a teeming horde of casual coders so I'll step up and provide some links to the advice on SO about consuming web services from VB6: for [REST](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3516119/get-post-to-restful-web-service); for [SOAP](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/122607/what-is-the-best-way-to-consume-a-web-service-from-vb6). – MarkJ Apr 11 '14 at 12:02
  • I think you missed the point. The remark was not about REST and SOAP, but specific cloud service API implementations. – Bob77 Apr 11 '14 at 20:01
  • Concrete example, here are the SDKs Amazon offers covering many of their cloud computing offerings: https://aws.amazon.com/tools/?nc1=f_dr and there are 3rd party and community offerings as well. But try to find any supporting VB6 and VBA develpment. – Bob77 Apr 12 '14 at 02:31