Re: Jacada Seagull and the like

I have had some experience with Seagull, but that was several years ago
(light years, in the GUI business!). My one piece of advice is, if you
think you want a screen scraper, look very carefully.  There are products
out there that do a good job of _looking_ like a Windoze application, but
they do less well at _acting_ like one. This can include how text boxes
work (are there fixed-length fields behind the scenes?), how buttons work,
etc. This basically comes down to the limitations of the 5250 data stream
and the back-end RPG -- remember, if all it's doing is scraping the
screen, it can't do anything that the back-end program won't support.

IMHO, if you want GUI, you're better off avoiding screen scrapers and
getting something "real" -- either Joe's solution (I haven't tried it, but
it sounds like a great idea), or some other product that produces a real
PC app for the front end, written in Java, VB, C++, or whatever.
Otherwise, your users will end up being frustrated by the fact that your
screen-scraped apps don't behave the way they "should", and nobody will be
happy.

Just my $.02,


midrange-l@midrange.com writes:
>> I hope this is the right place to ask this question....
>>
>> We are thinking about buying a package to gui-ize our front end....
>> At the present we are not going the e-business route, but just trying to
>> give the users a prettier interface....
>> I just wanted to know if any of had experience with either Seagull or
>> Jacada
>> and could give some direction on what to ask and any gotchas the sales
>> people tend to forget about....
>> Also, these are the only two companies that I know of who have this type
>> of product.  If there are more please send me information on them...


Mike Naughton
Senior Programmer/Analyst
Judd Wire, Inc.
124 Turnpike Road
Turners Falls, MA  01376
413-863-4357 x444
mnaughton@juddwire.com