AS/400 Newbie - whats going on...

[Nosh]

Hi Guys,

My boss has just asked me to do some JWALK work on an AS/400. I don't know JWALK and I've never seen an AS/400 in my life! "How hard can it be" he says! The comms should be set up in a few weeks but in the meantime I thought I'd find out a bit about these midrange beasts.

When people talk about iSeries what do they mean? Is an AS/400 one of the family of iSeries machines?

Does anybody know where I can find some good AS/400 resources like free tutorials etc!!

Yours Hopefully
Nosh.

 

[jmd0252]

Look on the IBM website, for a start. I salute you for your spirit. "how hard can it be". Very Famous last words. Check the IBM redbooks,,, they can be a help to you. Be interested to know, your background, and what you have worked on before??

 

[Nosh]

Ive got a IBM MVS background (COBOL/CICS/DB2) - I don't know why my boss thinks I can do this - but hey I'll give it a go...

RPG sounds like a nightmare!

 

[iSeriesCodePoet]

IBM has tons of information. Another place to look is

http://koldark.hopto.org/twiki/bin/view/Programkb/ResourcesPage

I have a few resources there as well. It is far from complete, but I also just started.

RPG, IMO, is much easier to program than COBOL. Once you learn the positioning and use /free (V5R1 and above only) formatted code it is very simial and it is faster to code RPG than COBOL. For RPG, I would recommend a book by either Brad Stone, Joe Pluta, or Bob Cozzi, these are respected gurus in the iSeries world.

However, JWalk sounds like a Java thing. What is JWalk? Java can be run on the iSeries (or AS/400), but can't you run that on your mainframe as well? I guess not, it is an iSeries thing. JWalk looks like an intergrator of some sort (

http://www.seagullsw.com/products/jwalk.html).

Let me know if you have more questions. The Midrange.com email lists is a VERY good resource as well. The people I spoke of above are regulars on the lists.

iSeriesCodePoet
IBM iSeries (AS/400) Programmer

See my progress to converting to linux.

http://koldark.hopto.org/linux/

The Programmer's Knowledge Base ->

http://koldark.hopto.org/twiki/bin/view/Programkb/WebHome

 

[Bradlm]

JWalk is a program that creates a GUI overlay to the AS/400 "green" screens. I've been working with it for 3 1/2 years, coming from a VB background with some AS/400 experience. If you can use a WYSISYG program and know VB, it's a very simple, though limited tool. The usual configuration is a java applet launched via an HTML file, but there is also an HTML-only client and a Windows-based client.