Re: Communicating with COM objects from iSeries via Java?

[James Rich <james@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 12 Dec 2005, johnking@xxxxxxx wrote:

> We have a requirement to fax certain documents to users who do not have
> email. The iSeries fax products I've seen so far are primarily designed to
> translate and deliver spool files. We, on the other hand, need to push PDF
> and Excel files that happen to be stored on the IFS.

This is almost exactly the same situation we were in earlier this year. 
While our solution may not work for you, it works very well for us and may 
give you some ideas to work on.

The primary difference between what we did and your situation is that we 
use hylafax (http://www.hylafax.org) instead of winfax.  We chose hylafax 
for two reasons:  1) it runs on linux and 2) it has a java communication 
package called gnu.hylafax (http://www.net-foundry.com/java/gnu/hylafax/). 
gnu.hylafax does all the hard work and since it is java it runs on the 
iSeries.

We created a java wrapper for the gnu.hylafax interface to make calling it 
from RPG simpler.  The documents we are faxing are postscript files, but 
PDFs work equally well.  Here is an example of our RPG code:

DHylaFAXInterface...
D                 PR         65535A   varying
D                                     EXTPROC(*JAVA : 'com.eaerich.hyl+
D                                     afax.HylaFaxInterface':'sendFax')
D                                     static
D destination                65535A   varying const
D filename                   65535A   varying const
D covername                  65535A   varying const
D fromname                   65535A   varying const
D notifyaddress              65535A   varying const

Dhfaxerror        S          65535A   varying
Dfaxnumber        S          65535A   varying
Dfile             S          65535A   varying
Dfilecover        S          65535A   varying
Dfrom             S          65535A   varying
Demail            S          65535A   varying

  faxnumber = '555-555-5555';
  file = '/path/to/file/to/be/faxed';
  filecover = '/path/to/file/to/use/as/a/coverpage';
  from = 'USERNAME';
  email = 'senderemail@xxxxxxxxxx';
  hfaxerror = HylaFAXInterface(faxnumber:file:filecover:from:email);

HylaFAXInterface() is the java wrapper we wrote for gnu.hylafax.  The 
wrapper is about 156 lines of java code including comments.  So we ended 
up doing very little coding.  The gnu.hylafax package works without 
modification.

We are very pleased with the results.  It works reliably and is quite 
flexible.  I'd be happy to share the java wrapper if anyone is interested. 
In fact, I think I was going to post it anyway and just never got to it.

P.S.  Another nicety of our solution is that we can bundle many documents 
together to be sent as a single fax.  This is important since sometimes we 
had many invoices that needed to be sent to the same destination but we 
didn't want to send 5 different faxes.

James Rich

It's not the software that's free; it's you.
        - billyskank on Groklaw