RE: webfacing and competing products

> From: Martin Rowe
>
> Hi Joe
>
> My WRKUSROUTQ contains most of WRKSPLF/WRKOUTQ functionality using APIs
> etc. It's free and open source so could be added to easily enough, as I
> think it might need in that situation. For instance you get prompted for
> IBM commands for a 2=CHGSPLFA

Hi Martin!  Would you mind if I downloaded the code and converted it?  It
would be cool to see what the converted code looked like!  Then, if I
included the utility with my tool, I'd obviously always give you full
credit.  I'll link it up with my CPYSPLFPDF and I'll have quite a nice
utility!  I would add an option to convert the file, with a small database
file that would contain the link between the spooled file and its PDF
version.  Then I could simply add that as a hyperlink on the web version of
the tool by putting the URL in a hidden field!

Too cool!


> Assuming you're running on Windows, that is. Then again WebFacing only
> works in IE...

Don't beat them up too much for it.  In order to match the functionality I
have, you pretty much have to go with IE.  Netscape makes it very difficult
to dynamically modify events, which is required for enabling function keys
and handling shift codes.


> > OS/400 menus can be replaced with DDS menus pretty quickly.  If you use
> > command prompting rather than actual DDS, you're in a more difficult
> > position.
>
> Quite. I presume even third party or in-house commands would have
> the same
> problem.  Converting commands to CL/DDS does seem a bit clumsy :(

This is always an issue in development, and in the long run it comes down to
make vs. buy.  If you "buy", in this case using the prepackaged command
prompter mechanism, then you have to live with compatibility issues.  It's
the same with using vendor-specific extensions to the servlet API.  That's
why PSC/400 is so vanilla.  There were some nice things in WebSphere that I
coded myself because they weren't available in Tomcat.  And now, some of
those things have changed in WebSphere to a more open standard, and I'm glad
I made the decision I made.

This is in fact the main reason I push JSP/servlet over any sort of
proprietary GUI language.  If you need something that's not in the
proprietary language, you're pretty much at the mercy of the vendor.  On the
other hand, with JSP and servlets you can do anything that can be done with
HTML and Java.  And if you're willing to toss in a little JavaScript, you
can do just about anything.

Joe