RE: Thats all folks! -- MIDRANGE-L

Transmission time has little to do with it, especially when you are
dealing with small web pages. The big time hogs are the web server,
which I admit often isn't a problem, though this depends somewhat on how
many users you have hitting it at once, and if you were to replace all
your green screens with web browsers I'll bet that this would become an
issue. The other thing that takes time is the browser rendering the
page, which increases as the page gets more complex/nicer looking. Also
if you throw the Javascript for handling field edits you will get
increased rendering times. I agree that webfacing can work, and for a
large portion of the people on this list it may be a good solution,
because what we need is a replacement for a green screen including a
command line. But for many if not most of the actual users of the AS400
what they need are a small set of applications which they can open from
their windows/x-windows desktop. One of the advantages to having an
x-client created for each program is that a user could open each
application instead of opening a client access session and then
navigating to the application they need. Heck we don't want/allow most
of our users access to the command line.

Joe Lee



>>> joepluta@PlutaBrothers.com 12/18/2002 13:03:44 >>>
> From: Joe Lee
>
> But I don't want webfacing. The web is too slow, even the fastest
web
> server/browser combination takes a noticeable amount of time to get
a
> new page, I don't want my data entry people that can type 100wpm
waiting
> even 1 second between pages. I want my applications to have the same
> response times as my green screen apps. This means that I need to
have a
> client that has a constant connection to the AS400 not a web browser
> that has to make an HTTP request every time I want a new screen.

Joe, you might not want webfacing, but HTML isn't necessarily as bad as
all
that.  On my little model 270, I get subsecond response time all the
time.
Think about it; if you can keep your web pages under 10KB (or 80KBits)
on a
typical 100MB Ethernet line, you're talking less than a millisecond in
actual transmission time.


> I have been using and creating web pages since ~93 and I think that
it
> is great for many things but a replacement for a green screen isn't
one
> of them. The web is great for reporting, but it sucks for data
entry,
> and where most users of the AS400 spend most of their time is doing
data
> entry not viewing reports.

I generally see response times of about a quarter of a second on my
LAN.
You can hold down the roll key and roll through pages three or four a
second.

The big issue in usability is probably typeahead, which incidentally is
a
function of your emulator, not the 5250 interface.  There's also the
issues
surrounding numeric only fields and the like, all of which can be
handled
with just a little JavaScript.

Joe Pluta
Pluta Brothers Design, Inc.
www.plutabrothers.com

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