Re: 5250 to Web Interface / Application Modernization

OK - now I see what you are doing.

Pity you don't sell it or Open Source it. Powerful stuff.

But since you don't and this is a technique that you have built tools to handle over (I suspect) many hundreds if not thousands of hours - well it is not terribly practical as an approach for a first-timers web exploits. Heck I'm familiar with the basic concepts of the shared memory APIs but have never used them - that's true geek level stuff!

Thanks for clarifying.


Jon Paris

www.partner400.com
www.SystemiDeveloper.com

On Apr 8, 2019, at 3:22 PM, Nathan Andelin <nandelin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I could comment more easily Nathan if I new what you meant by "Our web
portal submits a Job, then redirects browsers to communicate with that
Job."

When users click on a menu item, that sends a request to our portal's URL.
Our web portal is an IBM i Job that submits another IBM i Job by using the
SBMJOB command, generates a unique "session ID", which is assigned to that
Job, generates another URL that includes that unique session ID, and
redirects the browser to that URL.

How does it communicate? data queue? The browser can't arbitrarily connect
to a job as it requires a port connection and there's a limited number of
those so your 10s of thousands of users would be problematic.

In regard to your communication question, an HTTP server thread extracts
the "session ID" from the requested URL and sets up a communication channel
with the appropriate Job, using IBM i shared memory APIs, which is the
fastest form in inter-process communication that I'm aware of.

I agree with your point about there being a limited number of ports. We
tend to configure an IBM i HTTP server instance to handle thousands of
connections on a single port, which causes it to instantiate thousands of
threads, internally.

Not asking for trade secrets - just the basic mechanics of what you do.


A complete answer would be somewhat more entailed. But hopefully you get
the gist. I should stress that this is NOT IBM's persistent CGI interface,
which is delineated at:

https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/ssw_ibm_i_73/rzaie/rzag3ch3ovrvwpercgi.htm
--
This is the Midrange Systems Technical Discussion (MIDRANGE-L) mailing list
To post a message email: MIDRANGE-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To subscribe, unsubscribe, or change list options,
visit: https://lists.midrange.com/mailman/listinfo/midrange-l
or email: MIDRANGE-L-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Before posting, please take a moment to review the archives
at https://archive.midrange.com/midrange-l.

Please contact support@xxxxxxxxxxxx for any subscription related questions.

Help support midrange.com by shopping at amazon.com with our affiliate link: https://amazon.midrange.com