RE: Thats all folks! -- MIDRANGE-L

It doesn't have to be X-windows, X is just the most widely available
protocol for doing this that I can think of off hand. But what X buys
you are a couple of things, first you have a stateful application
instead of the statelessness of HTTP, and yes you could use session ids
to emulate a stateful connection but that is just added overhead. Second
as you pointed out in another email, your 5250 session is about 10 times
as fast as your web pages are, and that's for fast small web pages.
Third you don't have to have the data bloat that you have with any
markup language, I'm all for XML/SGML for some things but when you are
only using the data to talk between two machines it just requires extra
time and processing. I'm sure there are other advantages to a dedicated
client application but I can't think of them off hand.

I will agree that using X instead of 5250 isn't advancing us much,
other than giving us the GUI glitz that so many PHBs apparently must
have, but I don't think that where we are is that bad. Personally I
think that for the vast majority of users 5250 is probably one of, if
not the best interface they could have. The only problem with twinax
terminals I see is that you can't also get email, and web browsers on
them (yes I know you can do email but most people don't). As for not
being able to browse the web or view a word document, hospital
admitters, or DMV clerks, or any of the other kinds of data entry
operators, don't have time to do that anyway.

To analogize it in terms of programming languages, C or Java are fine
languages, but if I want to do business/database programming give me RPG
(or at least COBOL).

Joe Lee

>>> joepluta@PlutaBrothers.com 12/18/2002 13:43:40 >>>
> From: Joe Lee
>
> 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.

Okay.  An icon to a browser with a hardcoded URL.  Remove all the
chrome,
and it looks like an application.


> 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.

Have one browser open for each application.


> Heck we don't want/allow most
> of our users access to the command line.

So I fail to see what X-windows buys you that HTML doesn't.

Personally, if you were to go to a non-HTML interface, I'd prefer some
thing
a bit more generic - an SGML-based language that would then be
translated on
the client to something graphical.  This would be the OBW, or Open
Business
Widget, specification.  All programs would adhere to this
specification, and
then you could truly plug in whatever interface you wanted.

To me, substituting X-Windows for 5250 is simply treading water.

Joe

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