mainframe and ASP 1

[jestrada101]

has anyone worked with getting ASP to talk to a mainframe? if so, could you point me to good documentation.

Thanks!
JE

 

[Sheco]

Yes, in a round-about way... by making a ActiveX DLL that functioned as a terminal emulator.

Oh, and another time via ODBC, but that was no different than any other ODBC source.

 

[jestrada101]

How would you rate the performance?

Thanks
JE

 

[Sheco]

The ODBC was better than the terminal emulator.

By terminal emulator I mean that the DLL looked at the same text stream as those old "green screen" terminals. (some also had amber colored screens).. This was slow for large datasets, because of the paging.

 

[Sheco]

But slow is relative i guess... it was fast enough to be useful as an intranet web-app... but it would have been a slow way to do a data transfer.

You know, because people can only read so many lines per minute, as long as you are going twice as fast as people can read then there is no real perception of "slowness

 

[jestrada101]

True... thanks for your feedback Sheco!

 

[tsdragon]

FYI, looking a terminal data streams that way is commonly known as "screen scraping".

Tracy Dryden

Meddle not in the affairs of dragons,
For you are crunchy, and good with mustard.

 

[Sheco]

If your users are all like 55 years old and they have been using the "green screen" program since 1970 then they will have a bunch of keystroke shortcuts memorized and if they don't complain about speed it will be something else... its the old dog/new trick problem.

Your "wins" with these people come from studying their usage patterns... look for places where they view Screen A and then 95% of the time proceed to Screen B... you get a win by building your ASP so that the Screen B data is included on Screen A... so that you save them the keystroke.