Re: HATS Best Practices

On 1/3/07, Pete Helgren <Pete@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"the docs are a bit thin" (!) You are being very gracious......

Hey, I'm trying to be nice.  There may be some IBM'ers monitoring this
list that could help us out ;-)

The login screen looks very different but they still login.  They don't
know that it is a "green screen" app and to prevent them from becoming
suspicious we changed many things around.

Gotcha.  Are you using macros to take them to a particular app, or are
you just HATSing (did I just make up a verb) your menus.

I've been barely scratching the surface.  The toolkit is VERY deep but
also poorly documented. I'd really love to roll up my sleeves and dive
in but I haven't found the time or a good resource at IBM to keep things
moving.  HATS is a wonderful transitional tool.  Start with basic
transforms and then slowly replace the 5250 stuff with .JSP based
programs.  Even if you took 2 or 3 years to change it all from HATS
transformations to "native" .JSP's your users would get a immediate
change to look and feel.

Like most other tools, it has a place in the toolbox.  What I'm
looking at using it for, in particular, is where we can improve upon a
5250 app with some basic transformations and move it to our intranet.
I'm pretty convinced that in some cases, we can add some value with
HATS and get an app on our intranet quicker than if we try to separate
the business logic from the presentation and write a pure servlet/jsp
front end.

My Java kids cringe at this, but there's enough call for moving stuff
into the browser that we need all the help we can get.

One piece of HATS functionality that I keep hearing about, but can
find no docs on, is the ability to turn a 5250 app into a web service.
We had an IBM'er in here last month talking to us about SOA and
mentioned this functionality in HATS.  So I asked him where the
documentation for this is.  I'm still waiting on an answer.

It isn't a bad option for some shops and IBM
is putting more resources (it seems) into the product.  Now, if they
could just get the documentation squared away and have some live,
classroom based training available, I be very satisfied.

Same here.

Mike Eovino wrote:
> Good points.  Do you actually throw up the signon screen, or have you
> come up with a better way to get the user's credentials?  I see hints
> of a better way than the signon screen, but unfortunately, the docs
> are a bit thin.
>
> Thanks!
> Mike E.
>
> On 1/3/07, Pete Helgren <Pete@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> Mike,
>>
>> In our case, we have everyone use their own profile since we have
>> settings that are user profile specific in our programs and the users
>> also have their own outqueues to map to. Beyond that, since under the
>> covers (so far) it's all 5250 programming, we haven't changed much of
>> our existing practices.
>>
>> Pete Helgren
>>
>> Mike Eovino wrote:
>>
>>> All,
>>>
>>> My shop is just starting to use HATS.  Any suggestions on best
>>> practices?  For example, should you force the user to log in, or
>>> should you record a login macro and log all users in with the same
>>> profile?
>>>
>>>
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