Re: Green-screen versus browser -- MIDRANGE-L

This whole approach seems rather negative to me. Maybe a different approach with a positive slant may be a better marketing/PR tool? I suggest this....

Trevor

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The iSeries user interface design included the 5250 telnet green screen interface. While this green screen method is still a leading interface on iSeries, the acceptance of modern graphical user interfaces has caused the green screen to become outdated.

There is no native iSeries graphical user interface, however, the available solutions are many and include thin client browser solutions to fat client windows solutions.

The browser interface is gaining acceptance as a zero footprint, zero installation interface for modern applications. It has an advantage in that a browser is shipped with every Windows operating system, and the ongoing competition between browser manufacturers keeps this interface improving.

On the other side, the browser is primarily bloat-ware, requiring lots of PC resources, and producing mostly a very thin client interface lacking in function and functionality. HTML is a TEXT language, designed to access the world wide web as opposed to being a graphical interface to modern applications. From a traditional application perspective, migrating to a browser generally involves a loss of functionality for the user.

IBM has offered various graphical user interfaces - most of which use Websphere Application Server to deliver the user experience. Websphere Application Server on the iSeries is in its infancy stages, and generally iSeries customers find it requires heavy iSeries resource usage for a significantly slower user response time.

There have been many successful third party applications to provide graphical user interfaces for the iSeries to replace the green screen interface, enhance the user experience and improve user productivity. The best of these range from thin HTML clients with zero deployment to full function Windows clients that can be automatically deployed with a smart client to produce rich function and no iSeries performance impact.

The iSeries has the scalability, performance, robustness and reliability to allow a company to trust running their business with no downtime and little effort to maintain and backup their application server. With the correct combination of graphical user interface front end tool to the iSeries as the back end server, companies can deliver their solid business applications to users in a timely manner, with increased functionality without impacting the performance of the users undertaking their business tasks.

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----- Original Message ----- Subject: Green-screen versus browser

I'm writing a management paper for a customer (in support of the
iSeries but trashing the WebSphere "solution" and the lack of native
browser support) and working on a concise description of the
green-screen vs. browser question.  The context is to explain why the
iSeries, in spite of all its greatness (performance, low TCO,
reliability), isn't known to and/or accepted by a large portion of the
IT community.  One factor is IBM's previous marketing failures (no
other word for it, sorry; well, maybe "absence"); another reason is
the preponderance of the green-screen UI, my current topic.

Here's what I have so far:

"The problem with green-screen is that the programmer is limited to a
fixed font size, a limited color palette, essentially no support for
graphics, only 132 columns (across), only 27 lines (down), and the
requirement to use a non-standard, usually non-free terminal emulation
program (Client Access, etc.), which means you can't talk directly to
many new communications devices like PDA's.

"There is nothing innately good about browsers; except for Firefox,
they're bloated with generally useless features, each has its own
unique characteristics (meaning it doesn't work exactly the same as
other browsers), and many continue to be a gateway ("Gates way"?) for
viruses and spyware.

"The benefit of browsers is that the programmer has much greater
control over what the user sees and how the screen works...but it
takes a lot more programming effort to deliver a browser-based
application.  The basic tradeoff is balancing time-to-deliver (low for
green-screen, high for browser), function (low for green screen, high
for browser), and performance (relatively high for green-screen,
relatively low for browser).

Am I missing any points meaningful to senior management?

Thanks,
Reeve