screenio and web development?

HI

Our company currently using the data interchange system written by
cobol. My boss want the existing text based user interface upgrade to
webpage in order for our customer to easily access our system. I came
across this apllication called ' screenio' which claims to be able to
have a web deployment up and running in as little as 5 minutes. But i
did a little search internet and couldn't find much info about puting
cobol appplcaition on web (ie. using browser as GUI). I am not a cobol
programmer (do know C , some php and sql) and i need some info to setup
a feasible timeline for such project.


Does anyone have experience using "screenio" in web application ?Can
anyone point me to the right source where i can get more information
about putting cobol frontend as webpage(say, do we need a dedicated web
server or simply some application like screenio can acted as web
server) ?

ps: below is the url.
http://www.screenio.com/gui_screenio/gs_network.htm

david

Thanks in advanced

> apllication called ' screenio' which claims to be able to
> have a web deployment up and running in as little as 5 minutes.

Screenio is a user interface library that allows one to write GUI
applications in Cobol.  Basically you do not do ACCEPT/DISPLAY or
SCREEN SECTION for the UI but CALL screenio which displays a GUI
dialog.

Once you have developed the application with all the appropriate code
and the screen designs _then_ it only takes 5 minutes to change from a
'one piece' application to a 'two piece' with the CALLs creating a link
to the remote client.

This is not a web browser application and the client end must be
installed (though that could be done over the web).

Similar facilities exist for Flexus SP2.

> and couldn't find much info about puting
> cobol appplcaition on web (ie. using browser as GUI).

Writing a Cobol CGI program driven by web pages and forms is done
exactly as one would do a program in C.  There are libraries for Cobol
systems that take away some of the grunt work but I posted some Cobol
code that does much of this. See clc thread 'MS Cobol 5.0 and CGI' or
search for CGIINPUT.CBL.

CGI programs are stateless this means that the program will gets
requests in from several users in a random way.  Usually you deal with
this by sending a 'cookie' that identifies each client and is returned
with each interaction. You would probably want to go through a logon
process that then sends an identification code in the cookie and stores
data keyed by this.

When a message arrives you extract the cookie and use the code to
retrieve the state information (if none send logon page).

> do we need a dedicated web server

The CGI code that I have written has worked on OS/2 with IBM WebServer
or Xitami web server, Windows with Xitami, Unix with Netscape server
and Linux with Apache.  It just uses bog standard CGI getting its input
with an ACCEPT from stdin (with minor variations) and outputting using
DISPLAY to stdout.

Visit www.flexus.com They have tools that will give what you are looking
for.

Tony M. Mina.


<dfeng@fdrive.com.au> wrote in message
news:1116395520.091215.109220@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> HI
>
>  Our company currently using the data interchange system written by
> cobol. My boss want the existing text based user interface upgrade to
> webpage in order for our customer to easily access our system. I came
> across this apllication called ' screenio' which claims to be able to
> have a web deployment up and running in as little as 5 minutes. But i
> did a little search internet and couldn't find much info about puting
> cobol appplcaition on web (ie. using browser as GUI). I am not a cobol
> programmer (do know C , some php and sql) and i need some info to setup
> a feasible timeline for such project.
>
>
>  Does anyone have experience using "screenio" in web application ?Can
> anyone point me to the right source where i can get more information
> about putting cobol frontend as webpage(say, do we need a dedicated web
> server or simply some application like screenio can acted as web
> server) ?
>
> ps: below is the url.
> http://www.screenio.com/gui_screenio/gs_network.htm
>
> david
>
> Thanks in advanced
>

I try to look for some existing product solution like Liant Relativity
server. But they told me our program might not be supported since it is
a bit old. The compiler we used is CA-Realia workbench 3.0 and our
cobol data interchange system is run under dos (a pretty old IBM
machine) Just wonder is there any package out there can help us to
bring our system over the web with minimum change of code?

> Just wonder is there any package out there can help us to
> bring our system over the web with minimum change of code?

Telnet, ssh, putty.