Re: Pete's web5250 was->Re: Business Developers was ->Re: IBM Gives RPG Devotees Their Own Café

Nathan Andelin skrev:

From: Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen
I am unfamiliar with the term "virtual terminal interface".
Is it a telnet server or a completely different beast?

I don't think very many developers know much about the virtual terminal interface. IBM hasn't published much information about it. There's some documentation at the IBM i Information Center. It's the interface that many of the screen-scraper vendors use. It provides for a native IBM i middleware server in between a green-screen application and whatever client is on the other end of the conversation.

Your server in the middle therefore has the opportunity to transform the 5250 data stream to some other format.

It sounds to me like it is a part of the WebFacing system, which I have understood is implemented in this way.

I found "Virtual Terminal APIs" which sounds like it is what you describe.

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/iseries/v5r3/index.jsp?topic=/apis/wfenvapi.htm

It appears that there is an automatic sign-on mechanism in QTVOPNVT which is nice, but it appears there is not a mechanism for breaking the 27x132 character limit. Pity, that is in my mind the most crippeling feature of the green screen.

From a quick browse I could not see any reason to use this API as opposed to just creating a telnet connection (which is much simpler and not dependent on an API). Pity :(