Re: Say Hello to IBM System i5! -- MIDRANGE-L

Without being obtuse, I did say "IBM needs to find ~the~ solution that theywill offer". I maintain that WDHT is the ~one~ that they will offer. I didnot comment on its capabilities or functionality. I am less worried that IBMdoes not have the ~best~ solution out there - just that they stick to ONE. Ithink this opens the competition up, and to disagree with you, I think thereare some good solutions out there - from programming to dynamic refacing.

I do agree with you Joe - that IBM needs better tools. But while they don'tgive them to us, you and your competitors have a market!

----- Original Message -----From: "Joe Pluta"

Subject: RE: Say Hello to IBM System i5!

Ah gz, no.  5250 transformation tools by definition are nearly useless in
creating web applications.  Except for those applications which are in
effect 5250 green screen in a browser (data entry applications, for
example), the limitations of the green screen are simply too much to cope
with.

I've been at this for well over five years, and I can guarantee that the
requirements of a B2C user are completely different than those of a B2B
user, which in turn are different from the data entry users.  And there
isn't enough information in the 5250 data stream to allow for the proper
development of those interfaces.

You CAN, with a lot of work and some real creativity, manage to get
something that works reasonably well.  There are certain limitations, but

you can create screens that look and function very nicely in multiplemodes,

but the data won't fit in the 5250 data stream.  At the same time,
query-based Web applications need to be created from scratch, using either
native frameworks or tools like WebSmart and Paul Holm's WOW product.

Without these sorts of point-and-click front ends, today's informationusers

get all upset.

So what we need is NOT just another screen-scraping tool.  What we need is
an inclusive development environment (like Portal but a lot cleaner with a
much smaller footprint) where you can combine pure web applications and

refaced legacy applications. The problem is that there are too manyoptions

today, and most of them are bad.

Joe

From: Trevor Perry

I agree, IBM needs to find ~the~ solution that they will offer for non-
5250.
I think they might have that now with WDHT in V5R4. It still will compete
with third party tools, but now they ~should~ have everyone speaking the
same language of GUI.