>I am a developer working on some integration projects for my company. >We have created a scraping tool which utilizes the OCX provided by the >PCOM setup to scrape values off of the screen and populate them into >our software. This helps out our clients a lot as they do not have to >reenter keystrokes. >My dilemma is how can we demonstrate this ability to potential clients >without having to connect to their IBM AS400 system (or any server for >that matter)?
IBM has a utility called the Host Simulator Tool(*) which should be exactly what you need. Here's the link: http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg24007922 If you like it please purchase at least one WebSphere HATS license (per the download terms). If you have a license for i5/OS you might already have one, but even if not you won't spend much. The tool is very straightforward. The first step is to configure it as a "proxy." You connect PCom to it (using loopback 127.0.0.1 and a specific port) and you connect the tool to the host system. That's the way you can record host screens. Once that's done you can put the tool into playback mode, no host required. I *think* the tool supports both 5250 and 3270, but check that, please. FWIW, I would consider using the Java interfaces, notably the Host Access Class Libraries, if at all possible. That'll make your scraping tool portable and thus more appealing to potential customers. OCX is Windows-only ActiveX, and there are a fair number of companies, skewed toward ones with the host systems as a matter of fact, that frown on ActiveX. If you're talking about a desktop integration product, and the user is sticking with a terminal screen interface, HACL (and Java) would still be a great idea because then you could pick up support for Linux and Macintosh desktops since Host On-Demand supports those. You'll also pick up support for HOD Windows users. Or you can avoid screen scraping altogether -- a topic for a fuller discussion. (*) It's packaged as an EXE, but if you're slightly clever you can extract the Java code and run on any JVM on any platform. - - - - - Timothy F. Sipples Consulting Enterprise Software Architect, z9/zSeries IBM Japan, Ltd. E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
