Front-ending your Apps 

© April 2002, iSeries Magazine, Jef Sutherland

By Steve M. Roche

Powerlan USA

As a native front-ending solution for Microsoft Windows, WebTerm requires that you change nothing on the back end. Legacy applications run without modifications. You don’t need Java Servers or to install special software on Web servers. WebTerm supports ActiveX (as used here), Netscape Plug-in with LiveConnect, and XPCOM (for Netscape 6). WebTerm is also available for Macintosh.

Putting WebTerm to Work

It took only a few minutes to install and start the iSeries NEWS sample RPG application. From there, we simply added the desired customizations to the Web template. For this exercise, we added only support for displaying image files, which took about two hours.

We then edited one HTML file and added 12 lines of JavaScript code to the template. This file, a few others that go with it, and the sample image files were deployed on a Web server. We then connected to our Powerlan Freight ASP Web site and were ready to use the solution. We integrated the sample RPG application into a framework (or template) used for an ASP service we provide to the Freight Forwarding industry.

To the Maintain Items screen in Figure 1, we added a corporate banner across the top and a menu panel on the left side of the screen. The menu panel contains dynamically generated buttons for currently available commands (many people prefer to have JavaScript buttons under the main form; both are turned on here). In another screen not shown here, we also included calendar and date fields. Note that all processing is done on the PC, not on the host. The main part of the screen in Figure 1 is dynamically generated HTML that’s driven by an SSL TN5250E session between a Windows PC and our AS/400.

Figure 2 shows the Change screen, where we added a JavaScript button (View Item) that allows viewing of a selected item in a spawned browser window (we also could have displayed the image on the main page).

Figure 3 shows the source code to the HTML-based front end. Using simple graphical-based HTML editing tools, we created the front end using JavaScript, which in turn created the dynamic pages that make up the front end.

We made no changes to the sample application on the back end. No server software is necessary because all dynamic Web content is generated on a PC. On the back end, a companion 3812-printer session runs in tandem with the display session, letting you print to the local (PC) printer. The printer session is also secured with SSL. In less than three hours, we completed all customization in JavaScript.

To help you get started, you can use WebTerm’s dynamic content engine and customize pages on a screen-by-screen basis or globally as the need arises.
 

Copyright © 2003 Powerlan Ltd.