Re: Modernizing Green Screen Was: Re: IBM HATS vs. ?

Nathan,
Very interesting. I must have missed that one somehow. I will definitely
have to take a look for that. If I can find something that works like that I
will write something for it and be happy to share the source.

I like the data structure idea even more because like you said it could
generate any type of structure. I used XML because it has better support
than JSON, but JSON is becoming more popular for sure.
--
James R. Perkins
http://twitter.com/the_jamezp


On Tue, Oct 6, 2009 at 14:43, Nathan Andelin <nandelin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

James,

I have no idea what kind of support we might get from IBM in converting
5250 output to XML, but that idea reminded me of something that Niels
Liisberg of Denmark shared on the Web400 list.

Niels wrote an ILE C service program that used IBM's virtual terminal
interface to expose 5250 data streams as simple data structures, which could
subsequently be formatted in any way a developer might chose. He then wrote
an RPG utility that converted 5250 output to JSON formats - used by a
JavaScript client - apparently written by one of his colleagues at System &
Method.

It was good to see an ILE (server based) approach to screen scrapping,
which performed a lot better than anything else I've seen.

-Nathan.