configuration of c/s application

Dan:

        I would forget using ODBC unless you can guarantee that the users
connecting with it have no authority to use any files on the machine in a
manner that you don't want them to, as any of the standard PC applications
will give them the ability to read anything that they have authority to on
the AS/400, and database applications such as Access or Paradox will let
them update or delete the data.

        Using a "middleware" server to handle the data requests is one way
to solve the problem of the user having more rights to the data than you
want them to.  I agree that it can become a bottleneck, and it also becomes
a single point of failure for all users of the application.  I have found
that Win95 PCs that are constantly active need to be re-booted every couple
of days otherwise they become prone to going "blue screen" and requiring an
un-planned re-boot.

        If you have the C Compiler (or Pascal compiler also, I believe) for
the AS/400, and an appropriate operating system release level, you could
write a custom sockets application and communicate with it.  I think that
this is probably the best way to go.

        Since we didn't have either compiler, I ended-up writing a screen
scraper in Delphi on the PC, and integrated that into the application.  The
application starts a VT100 Telnet session with the AS/400.  When it
receives a connect event, it prompts the user for their User ID and
Password, and logs in.  The devices in use all start with a specific name,
so the initial sign-on program knows that the session for the user is not
their normal terminal emulation and starts an AS/400 application that the
PC talks to in order to send and receive data.  In this application, the
majority of the data is stored on a file server, and the AS/400 is used to
retrieve and update a small portion of the data used by the application. 
This would probably get to be a bit tedious if every client server
application that you wrote had to communicate with one or more AS/400
screens.

        Hope this helps.

                        --Paul Andralouis
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