Re: New use for tn5250

On Tue, 17 Nov 2009, Jim Donoghue wrote:

Everyone's 'Web-enabling' things these days. After a brief experience with a
terribly written data entry web form, I thought perhaps someone should
create a library or tool to '5250-enable' stuff. I know I've seen worse
'spare-time' projects on SourceForge....

I think this would be a very difficult thing to do since the 5250 protocol and the HTTP protocol are so vastly different. Unless I misunderstand you, what you are suggesting is basically a screen scraper for HTML and converting it to 5250 display codes. That sounds like a huge mountain to climb and I think few web user would want to suddenly see a green screen page instead of a typical web form. They wouldn't know what to do.

On the other hand, I can see a possibility to embed HTML markup in a 5250 screen (very, very simple markup). For example, suppose you wanted a picture to display next to a certain field in a typical 5250 application. Normally this is completely impossible. But suppose you had a 5250 emulator that was HTML aware. Then if your screen sent <img src="myimage.png" /> in a text field the emulator could act like a browser and display the linked image. That I think would be very interesting.

James Rich

if you want to understand why that is, there are many good books on
the design of operating systems. please pass them along to redmond
when you're done reading them :)
- Paul Davis on ardour-dev