Re: Looking for Advice/Suggestions

Also take a look at the ILEastic project - it is open source, free and
used in many projects now.

https://github.com/sitemule/ILEastic

<product_allert>
However If you just want to to bring the 5250 into your application, you
can do it with my product IceCap - that is not open source.
</product_allert>

On Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 5:41 PM Richard Schoen <richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

One thought that might be relatively bite-sized....

You can do a plain old HTML mockup of your app if you use the Bootstrap
HTML framework.

https://getbootstrap.com/

Bootstrap turns plain old HTML in to eye candy without needing much/if any
Javascript knowledge.

You can test your HTML app by opening the HTML in your browser to view
from a directory on your desktop or from Apache or another HTTP web server.

Build a little plain old HTML Bootstrap prototype that looks good and then
you can replace the data that needs to be dynamic by using RPG/CGI and
re-using some of your existing logic, PHP, Python or whatever else for the
web bits.

Auto-refreshing dashboards are a great use for the Bootstrap HTML
framework because you can do most of it with some simple HTML tables or
other replace tags in the template.

I call them poor-man's dashboards.

What I often do is create an HTML file template with some placeholders for
table data or other data so I can just replace those tags real-time with an
app that runs periodically (every few minutes/seconds or nightly). And with
an HTML refresh tag in the simple web page it looks like it's a fancy
auto-refreshing app on the big screens.

Viola - Instant dashboard.

Regards,
Richard Schoen
Web: http://www.richardschoen.net
Email: richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Phn: (612) 315-1745

----------------------------------------------------------------------

message: 1
date: Wed, 23 Oct 2019 08:44:17 -0500
from: "Kelley" <kelley.work@xxxxxxxxxxx>
subject: [WEB400] Looking for Advice/Suggestions



I'm not sure if this is the right list...

I'm looking for advice/suggestions on how to change an RPG/green
screen application to be accessible from a browser.

Last week I was at the RPG/DB2 conference in Minneapolis. A great
conference as usual. I was particularly interested in the open source
sessions and I'd like to try some of the techniques I watched being done.

The shop I work in has been a single person shop for a couple of
years now (down from three people). All of our software was developed
in-house over a period of many years. The code is mostly RPG400 and green
screens. I write any new code using RPG Free and other newer techniques,
however the applications are pretty stable so I don't write a lot of new
code. My other responsibilities (PC's, networks, and so on) keep me from
doing any refactoring.

The program I'd like to change is an RPG Free program that uses a
green screen display to show current yield data to the manufacturing line
(it displays a bar chart using control codes for different colors). It's
displayed on a large screen TV that is visible in the plant. It refreshes
every 15 seconds.

I'd like to update this process and move the display of the data
to a web browser so it can be visible to those without an IBM i client.
This is not an area I have much experience in. The closest I've come is
using CGIDEV to create a web page that displays sales data.

My question is, where to start? I've spent some time on the web
looking at various ways to do this, I think there are about a million.
What's the best way to ease into this?

To help narrow options down a bit, I know RPG, C and SQL. I've
done some simple HTML and CSS. I'm familiar with linux. I built a simple
inventory app a few years ago using a LAMP stack and PHP. I'm currently
learning Python.

Any and all suggestions are welcome.

Thanks, Kelley.


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