Recommendation : SAS Portal or Indepedent Web Portal

[Ronny_Dsouza]

Hi,

We are working on an engagement wherein the client has both SAS EBI as well as SAS VA,  one of the client's prime requirement is they would want their users to run complex analytic analysis such as VAR, PFE, EAR by entering relevant parameter in real time,  post the output obtained by

so the speculation from an performance aspect what is preferable...

1) Build the STP with the HTML, Javascript to surface the UI and all the subsequent UI for other work,  and seperate STP for each type of analysis and surface it via IDP  .... OR

2) Do we build a seperate web portal which will surface the UI and have the integration done via call to SAS web services.

note : we do know most of the processing is done at teh SAS server side, but want to hear the best practice to do so.

Cheers

Ronny

[JuanS_OCS]

Hi,

I don't really think there is a best practice here. In the end, it is just some STPs running the code for the user requests.

But, if you are planning to fill the UI with several javascript code, please keep in mind that IDP includes already several javascript, therefore you minght require to resolve some conflicts. Plus, you will need to adapt js behaviour to each web browser.

In other hand, if you have IDP and VA, I would definetly use Visual Analytics (more likley Visual Statistics since your reports are based on  statistical procedures) for those reports.

Best regards,

Juan

[Ronny_Dsouza]

hi Juan,

Unfortunately VA or VS cannot be utilized here as we need to do computation of VAR / PFE / EAR , which is not supported OOTB by VA,  thus for the same we would need to write an STP , which then would not be managed in the LASR server.

would be obliged to know if there is any alternate to STP wherein i can leverage the LASR server.

thanks in advance.

Ron

[boemskats]

Ronny,

The way we approach this problem with our customers is a third option:

3) Develop a frontend independently in HTML/JS to surface the UI and all subsequent UI for other work, but deploy it to your SAS Web Server htdocs directory, under LevX/Web/WebServer/htdocs/newFrontEnd. Rather than use the Web Services broker, use AJAX to the SAS Stored Process webapp, use this library to talk to SAS, giving you out-of-the-box single sign-on, enables per-user roles, and a whole bunch of other features.

Like Juan says, there isn't really a best practice here - it depends on what you're trying to achieve. But what you're talking about is extremely similar to the Apps we've been build on top of SAS for our clients for a long time, and we have refined this approach to be extremely efficient and easy to develop with. The library we maintain is free, licensed under the GPL, and if you have decent front-end developers at your disposal I recommend that you forward it to them to get their take on it.

Feel free to drop me a line if you want.

Nik

[Ronny_Dsouza]

Thanks Nik,  Really appreciate the input and the app you pointed too.

Regards

Ron

[LinusH]

IDP is a dead swan which would make it unwise for further investments.
Vaiya beings more openness to VA. Explore the new features there before making any strategic decisions.