Re: 5250 Data Streams WAS: Arrow keys + scroll keys

[Scott Klement <klemscot@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Pete,

> Booth and James, you both speak knowledgeably about the 5250 data stream yet
> in my perusing of the Information Center and other IBM sites (Redbooks for
> instance) and find remarkably little about 5250 data and how it is
> structured. Do either of you have a source of on-line or printed
> documentation you could recommend?


You want to learn the 5250 data stream?

Start here:
http://tn5250.sourceforge.net/resources.html

There's a lot of information there, but most of it is either background
details on telnet or telnet options (TN5250 is 5250 over telnet) and
background on things like character sets and code pages.

The bulk of the information that you want to know will be in three places:
RFC 1205, RFC 2877 explain how to implement 5250 over Telnet (TN5250 and
TN5250e respectively) and Chapters 15 & 16 of the 5494 Functions Reference
manual explains the raw details of the 5250 datastream.

One of the really great things about Open Source is that you can use the
source code as a learning material.  The TN5250 project is no exception!
Once you've looked at the reference material from that link you can dig
through the source code for the TN5250 project at
http://tn5250.sourceforge.net  Run the code in a debugger and watch what
it does with the datastream, follow along in the reference manuals...
that'll help you to really understand what's going on.