Re: Modify the IE Browser -- WEB400

Buck wrote:

Or, here's a radical concept, wouldn't a
5250 terminal better suit that style of application?

Sure; that's what iSeries is best at - green screen (emulated or physical).
RPG works best with fixed-length EBCDIC character data, or fixed-length
numeric data.  But as an ISV I can tell you definitively that we have lost
several million dollars in sales because of our green screen interface.
Literally, we had prospects terminate demonstrations because we weren't GUI.
I can't believe our prospective customers are alone in this 'GUI or nothing'
mindset.

So now we (as a community) are stuck with block mode 5250-based applications
that need to become GUI.  Or die.  After the disastrous thick client
deployment attempts of years past, customers are wary of installing anything
on their desktops.  Microsoft haven't helped here, with 'standard' software
like Office and Windows being ever larger, slower and buggier.

Which leads us to the browser.  Everybody has one these days; they're
multi-platform (sort of) and the customers perceive them to be GUI.  And
that's what counts.  The problem for us iSeries developers is that browsers
are stateless, and 5250 applications are stateful.  If only we could change
that aspect of the browser, even temporarily, then we could more readily
deploy our existing code base to a GUI front end.

Because the browser isn't a block mode device, we need to be able to twist
it into something it wasn't really designed to do.  Unless we are willing to
spend a year or five and completely re-architect our implicitly block mode
application into a stateless, character mode application.  Few companies are
willing to do that, so we sit at this uneasy truce between RPG and the web.
  --buck

I like that phrase "uneasy truce between RPG and the web". Yes, both HTTP and RPG are being called into service for things they never were designed for. And NOT doing so can result in lost business. Fun times we live in, eh?

Re-architecting applications is something that everyone has to face at some time or other. For example, the code base I work with on a daily basis is now some 15 years old, and is starting to show its age. Many of the design decisions made back then may have made sense then, but are now dragging us down.

Moving from a green-screen paradigm to a web paradigm is a big shift for a lot of reasons. I'm sure a lot of the people here whose livelihoods depend on "webifying" tradional OS/400 apps will disagree vehemently with me on this point (but so what?), but perhaps rewriting apps from scratch is the better choice in most cases.

Cheers! Hans