Re: Jacada Seagull and the like

Joe,
your world is a bit too narrow. There is more than just RPG out there.
The issue is this:
given a formal description of the screen, generate HTML.

In your case that formal description is a display file,
in my case it is an ETK (platform/device independent) screen,
in twincentrics case the internal description is build up from the datastream
(from that they could generate HTML [basically using my code] - they decided
to take the COM/ActiveX road instead). The point is that they have an
intermediate
formal description.

So, there are two problems:
1) get a screen description
2) generate HTML

To solve 1) you take what you have: display files, ETK screens, whatever.
Solving 2) is easy as we both agree. My original point was simply that
there are several people doing 1) and 2). Some do only 1) and then
go thick client instead of 2). Others do both.

Sometimes you want to express that screen description in a standard
way, e.g. as in: http://www.imatix.com/pub/info/iafpfl.pdf

What often happens with 1) is that customer says: "yeah, but I want some
animation or graphics logo or whatever" that was NOT in the original
screen description and most people come up with all kind of hokey
ways of adding that stuff (mostly leading to thick clients or a 3-tier
structure
just for the presentation - where the middle tier often becomes a real
bottleneck.

----- Original Message -----
From: Joe Pluta <joepluta@PlutaBrothers.com>
> Every RPG program that uses a display file has this underlying screen
> description.  I don't know about you, Leif, but all of my clients use
> display files in their RPG programs.  PSC400 works with any program that
> uses a display file, and does it by generating pure HTML.  There's a little
> bit of JavaScript for some of the more advanced functions, and that's it.
> No ActiveX, no COM, no applets, no thick client.