All this talk about UIM (Was: Would anybody know of a way, from a CL program, . . .)

["Mark S. Waterbury" <mark.s.waterbury@xxxxxxx>]

Hello, all:

By now, you may have noticed that UIM uses a "tag language" to define things
(screens, printouts)... and, for input "forms" based applications, too... as
well as handling "lists" of objects with actions, etc., much like PDM ...

Now, if only IBM had realized this, when they first tried to "figure out"
client-server apps., or web based applications, using HTML instead of a
5250... because, how hard could it be to translate from one tag-based
language to another (e.g. UIM to HTML), or for that matter, from UIM to XML?

Also, UIM uses a concept (familiar to mainframe ISPF programmers) called a
"variable pool" where the application stores (put) values into named
"variables" in a variable pool, to be displayed in fields on the display,
and receives any input values from fields on the display by retrieving (get)
named variables from the variable pool...

Hint: this is very similar to the way CGI programs work; they tend to use
"environment variables" to do much the same thing...

So, instead of decrying UIM as some sort of "odd-ball" technology that
should be avoided, I contend that it is a very modern architecture that
should be "embraced"...

That's just my opinion (from someone who has written a few UIM
applications).

Regards,

Mark S. Waterbury