Re: Communicating with COM objects from iSeries via Java? -- MIDRANGE-L

On Mon, 12 Dec 2005, johnking@xxxxxxx wrote:

We have a requirement to fax certain documents to users who do not have
email. The iSeries fax products I've seen so far are primarily designed to
translate and deliver spool files. We, on the other hand, need to push PDF
and Excel files that happen to be stored on the IFS.

This is almost exactly the same situation we were in earlier this year.While our solution may not work for you, it works very well for us and maygive you some ideas to work on.

The primary difference between what we did and your situation is that weuse hylafax (http://www.hylafax.org) instead of winfax. We chose hylafaxfor two reasons: 1) it runs on linux and 2) it has a java communicationpackage called gnu.hylafax (http://www.net-foundry.com/java/gnu/hylafax/).gnu.hylafax does all the hard work and since it is java it runs on theiSeries.

We created a java wrapper for the gnu.hylafax interface to make calling itfrom RPG simpler. The documents we are faxing are postscript files, butPDFs work equally well. Here is an example of our RPG code:


DHylaFAXInterface...
D                 PR         65535A   varying
D                                     EXTPROC(*JAVA : 'com.eaerich.hyl+
D                                     afax.HylaFaxInterface':'sendFax')
D                                     static
D destination                65535A   varying const
D filename                   65535A   varying const
D covername                  65535A   varying const
D fromname                   65535A   varying const
D notifyaddress              65535A   varying const

Dhfaxerror        S          65535A   varying
Dfaxnumber        S          65535A   varying
Dfile             S          65535A   varying
Dfilecover        S          65535A   varying
Dfrom             S          65535A   varying
Demail            S          65535A   varying

  faxnumber = '555-555-5555';
  file = '/path/to/file/to/be/faxed';
  filecover = '/path/to/file/to/use/as/a/coverpage';
  from = 'USERNAME';
  email = 'senderemail@xxxxxxxxxx';
  hfaxerror = HylaFAXInterface(faxnumber:file:filecover:from:email);

HylaFAXInterface() is the java wrapper we wrote for gnu.hylafax. Thewrapper is about 156 lines of java code including comments. So we endedup doing very little coding. The gnu.hylafax package works withoutmodification.

We are very pleased with the results. It works reliably and is quiteflexible. I'd be happy to share the java wrapper if anyone is interested.In fact, I think I was going to post it anyway and just never got to it.

P.S. Another nicety of our solution is that we can bundle many documentstogether to be sent as a single fax. This is important since sometimes wehad many invoices that needed to be sent to the same destination but wedidn't want to send 5 different faxes.


James Rich

It's not the software that's free; it's you.
        - billyskank on Groklaw