re: CMNT, java, mainframes
This is a bit difficult to explain in words alone, and I'm equally hindered by not being much of a 3270, mainframe, SNA, or channel connect expert. I think I can give you a basic understanding of the concepts behind the three products. (FYI, CNT's IBM software connectivity comes from an acquisition named 'Brixton'. This is who we originally licensed our internal 3270 emulator code from, so I'm somewhat familar with these guys. Good folks, from what I've seen, although we really haven't had much direct contact in several years.)
The first approach is to just give the user a 3270 screen in a window, as thought they had a real terminal as before, albeit in a smaller portion of the overall screen. This is what we have inside our system today, although it is a port of native C code. They now appear to have a version written in Java, which has the benefit of running in a far wider range of platforms. I would question the need to run it 'within' the browser, (I've seen this sort of approach, and the UI is a bit odd, to say the least), but it sort of comes for free due to the way browsers work, so hey, why not make it a 'feature' :). Consider this the approach that puts the effort to adapt on the side of the desktop, i.e., the host stays exactly the same.
The other approach is to leave the desktop alone, (in this case the desktop is defined to be 'the browser'), and modify either the host or something in the path between the host and the desktop. (It can be done either way. Based on what I know CNT does, putting various gateways and such between desktops and mainframes, I suspect they do the latter.) What you do is take the data stream coming out of the host, and turn the 3270 controls into HTML. The app still thinks it is talking to a 'dumb' 3270 terminal, but the user sees buttons, columns, fields, etc. Demos of this I've seen have been quite impressive, (there are several folks doing this, including IBM themselves). From what I have heard there are some corner cases that are difficult to map this way, however, and I've not run into anyone yet who has really implemented a serious system this way.
A small aside on this: GUI's, while 'friendly' and 'easy to learn', *slow* users down. If you want speed, you want good old fashioned 'hands on keys'. Where are most 3270 terminals? In front of heads down operators, payed by *speed*. In this environment, the move to a GUI over a plain text interface is not such a no brainer as moving to Windows over DOS on your home PC. On the other hand, the turnover in this sort of environment is high, so a quickly learned system has a counter argument. (One customer of ours in this type of environment has a *400%* annual turnover in staff!) What is happening in the 'terminal upgrade' world is that IS folks are weighing these sorts of issues, and moving at a pace that might seem slower than one might first expect. It will happen, but there is still work to do.
The third product is a bit different, but a reasonably obvious one for them to offer. Due to the first two, and due to their historical products, CNT knows just about everything there is to know in connecting to IBM mainframes. Given that, a 'toolkit' for others to use would seem to be fairly straight forward. Nichey market, but it's the same customer base they're talking to, so why not offer it? |
