Re: Re: New IT personnel

"MIDRANGE-L" <midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote on 06/08/2018
10:46:35 AM:

On Fri, Jun 8, 2018 at 5:41 AM, Winchester Terry
<terry.winchester@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Although CICS was solid communications interface, I was glad to leave

the

"conversational" world and move to the midrange where most of the

grunt work

was done by the OS ... and "smart" files :)

I don't know what "conversational" means in this context, but Dave
Clark was saying that display programming on the IBM i *is*
conversational, and that CICS gives you a choice of conversational or
not.

Here's what he said, exactly:

The mainframe CICS programming standard is that
you don't leave programs/transactions active while waiting for the

user to

key things in on the screen because this ties up resources that could

be

used elsewhere. You can make it conversational (as it is on the IBM

i)

and therefore have no issue with state -- but, as I said, that is not
recommended.

Yes, for those who may still be scratching their heads over the
difference, it is simply explained as follows -- notice the cycle is
reversed between them.

1. A conversational interactive process is where the program loops in a
send-receive screen cycle -- never exiting from memory until the user
requests it or the process is complete.
2. A psuedo-conversational interactive process is where the program does
a screen receive and then a screen send before exiting from memory -- only
to reenter automatically when the user presses an activation key on the
screen.

In the psuedo-conversational mode the process looks, to the user,
like the same send-receive cycle but it is not (thus, "psuedo"). This is
also how the HTTP web page cycle works from the HTTP server's perspective.
The client browser, on the other hand, is a send-receive (true
conversational) cycle as long as the browser is open.


Sincerely,

Dave Clark