Re: Web Services Adapter for 5250 Applications

On 2-Jul-08, at 12:38 PM, Nathan Andelin wrote:

Regarding my comment about the Zend 5250 Bridge being unwieldy for
developing web services adapters, that was just my first impression, and
I should probably defer to Jon Paris or somebody from Zend, if they'd
like to jump in. The thing that triggered my comment was the
understanding that the Webfacing server doesn't know display file "field
names", so the 5250 bridge generates names using sequential numbers
based on field positions on the screen.

You are correct Nathan in that the current implementation does not supply the field names.

I look at the Bridge as a work-in-progress. It is not so much what it does today as what it will be able to do once a few tool builders start working with it. If Joe wasn't so anti-PHP he might look to get some business out of adapting his current tooling and make some really nice extensions to it! <grin>

Bridge uses the WebFacing API and that API does not supply names - just access to the basic workstation buffer. Zend's code wraps that data into an XML stream and that is what is presented to the PHP code. WebFacing requires the DDS in order to obtain the field name and other details - obviously Bridge could also be extended to do that or work from DSPFFD type information.


Jon Paris

www.Partner400.com
www.SystemiDeveloper.com