RE: DDS Screens To Java -- MIDRANGE-L

> From: Nathan M. Andelin
>
> What I meant, was whether a request for a functional enhancement
> would lead
> to a change to both display file and java objects?  A new field
> is added, or
> a function key is added to branch to another screen, or field grouping is
> changed, or tab order is changed, or something of that sort?  In other
> words, if it takes one hour per year to maintain a 5250 display, will it
> take one plus hours to maintain both 5250 display and java objects?

Short answer: yes.  Which makes sense, if you think about it.  If you want
both a green-screen 5250 display and a "web-like" GUI, then you're really
maintaining two user interfaces.  There is no perfect one-to-one correlation
between a 5250 display and an HTML interface, although you can probably make
the "one plus" a relatively low "plus".  But that doesn't help if all you
want to do is have basically a 5250 display in a browser (to add Internet
access, or to remove the interactive tax).  That's why PSC400 has an
automatic 5250 emulation mode.  With that, you simply re-run the CNVPGM
command, which takes from 10-30 seconds to run, and your DDS changes are
automatically reflected in the 5250 emulation JSP.  No additional work
necessary.


> > The customized JSP is designed to be modified.  There's
> > also a header and footer JSP that can be used to provide
> > application-wide customization.
>
> My understanding was that a single JSP produced a single page.  Am I off
> base?  Does a JSP produce part of a page?  I guess so, because
> according to
> Buck, Webfacing produces a JSP for every record format.  And
> multiple record
> formats are output on a screen.

I was talking about PSC400, not WebFacing.  WebFacing creates JSP pages and
beans for each record format.  PSC400 doesn't create beans, just JSPs.  We
create one JSP for each "panel", a panel being defined as all the record
formats in a display file that share a common window.  In most cases, that's
one JSP per display file, although you may have additional JSPs if you have
popup windows in your DDS.  This approach reduces the complexity, and at the
same time, significantly reduces load.  We get subsecond response time after
the initial compile, and even the initial compile usually only takes a few
seconds.  PSC400 only generates about 4-8KB per page as opposed to 100KB or
more for WebFacing, which may be why we compile and run so quickly.
However, we've found that users also want to have a common look and feel for
their application, and rather than having them modify every generated panel,
they can instead include their common components (corporate logo, navigation
bar, and so on) in the header and/or footer JSP, which are included on every
page.

Joe Pluta
www.plutabrothers.com