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Wall Data Dishes Up Spicy SALSA For The Web

By Barry Nance SALSA Live! is a hot, tangy Web-and-database authoring tool that's not too spicy, not too chunky and not too saucy. As I put the final beta of Wall Data's sophisticated new Web design product through its paces, I relished SALSA's ability to create appetizing Web pages containing a variety of elements. Its $2,500 per-developer price tag, however, may burn a few tongues and keep it from becoming an easily digested, off-the-shelf commodity.

SALSA is quite platform-specific. Because the run-time component Semantic Services is an ActiveX/COM-based server process, and SALSA's generated Java Script programs take advantage of IIS (Internet Information Server), it works only with Microsoft Corp.'s IIS Web server and ASP (Active Server Pages).

Wall Data claims it works with ODBC (Open Database Connectivity)-compliant databases. I found that SALSA is suitable for publishing database content from small-to-medium-sized ODBC sources on Web pages, with little or no programming.

Double-Dipping SALSA is a cohesive, delicious mixture of database manipulation tools, Web page templates, a visual design environment and ActiveX/COM database interfaces. While it's a great standalone tool, I discovered that dipping SALSA's generated Web pages into an HTML editor such as FrontPage added a tasty crispness as I enhanced the appearance of the supplied templates. Because SALSA preserves custom HTML across sessions, my HTML didn't turn soggy.

The technology behind SALSA Live! is Wall Data's Semantic Object Modeling (SOM). SALSA's SOM emits Java Script-based ASP programs that run on the Web server computer. The ASP programs, in turn, produce HTML for display by a browser.

The product's visual design environment, comprise d of the DataWeb Toolbox, Semantic Templates and Code Generator, impressed me with its simplicity and intuitive interface. The environment's sizable left window (the Catalog) can contain either of two expandable lists: The domain catalog or the database catalog. The domain catalog shows an abstract list of your data items, while the database catalog identifies database servers, databases, tables and data elements.

The right window shows the object workspace or the view workspace. The object workspace depicts Semantic Objects, which are typically individual database tables. The view workspace graphically represents the data elements, data groups and relationships (linkages) that appear on the Web pages you're designing.

In SALSA's design environment, I dragged and dropped the elements. After I selected a Web page template from the dozen or so in the library, the product's SOM underpinnings emitted an ASP script containing HTML and Java Script statements.

I used the DataWeb Toolbox to model, create, reverse-engineer, change and migrate several database tables. I fed DataWeb Toolbox a small (but complex) database for migration, which it processed with alacrity. The migration feature worked well for two other databases under 1 GB, but choked when I deliberately force-fed it a complicated 9-GB Oracle 7.3 database.

Barry Nance, a computer analyst and consultant for 25 years, is the author of Introduction to Net-working, 4th Edition (Que, 1997) and Client/Server LAN Programming (Que, 1994). He can be reached at barryn@bix.com.