Looksoftware Takes OS/400 Transaction Processing Offline

Published: Sepetmber 26, 2006

by Alex Woodie

Two months ago, looksoftware introduced a pretty neat trick when it unveiled a new product that lets iSeries shops bypass interactive workloads as part of a modernization project--even if the users opt to keep their 5250 green screens. Last week at COMMON's Fall 2006 conference, the chaps from Down Under pulled another rabbit out of their hat: the ability to work with an OS/400 application from a browser interface, even when there's no connection to the "i" server.

Looksoftware sells a suite of software for modernizing OS/400 and z/OS applications with new interfaces and new ways of integrating with other systems, such as through Web services. The company sells both development and deployment tools as part of its "Dynamic Environment" suite. Three tools reside on the development side: a Webfacing tool called newlook; centric, which is used to create composite applications; and a Web services publishing tool called soarchitect. Anchoring the deployment side is lookserver, which serves interfaces to a variety of devices via the company's smartclient, liteclient, thinclient, and mobileclient offerings, as well as lookdirect for continued green-screen use (green is one of the many colors found in the IT jungle).

Looksoftware is currently gearing up for version 8 of this suite, which it refers to as its Dynamic Environment. At COMMON last week, the company announced the general availability of some version 8 products, including the addition of lookdirect, which it announced in July, and the addition of liteclient, which it announced in April. The rest of the version 8 products will be released before the end of the year, the company says.

Offline Support

The new "offline support" capability, which looksoftware focused on at the show last week, will be made available later this year. It will be delivered via a new release of smartclient, the company's most feature-rich deployment option, which leverages Microsoft's latest controls and interface technology. Changes to soarchitect will also enable the offline support feature.

With offline support, workers out in the field with no network access will be able to interact with their Web-enabled OS/400 applications as if they were fully connected to the iSeries server. This little feat will be made possible by caching the data as the worker enters it into their mobile interface (based on look's smartclient technology) and then "playing" the entire session back once they're back in the office or hooked into a suitable network connection.

Before workers can traipse across the country, however, somebody must first prepare the application for offline support. This entails using the Transaction Recorder component of the soarchitect tool to basically record the application, its navigation, and data fields.

Once the application screens and process flow have been recorded and stored to the smartclient device, the worker can then disconnect from the iSeries and still have the capability to enter data into the application. The data is stored in XML format, and is updated with the iSeries when the worker hits the "play" button. At that point, "the application will behave like a person sitting there typing the data in," says Marcus Dee, managing director of looksoftware.

Mobile salespeople will likely be the ones who use offline support the most. The ability to visit a new or existing customer and enter orders or make changes will be very useful, Dee says. Also benefiting will be programmers, who no longer must duplicate business logic on PDAs or worry about synchronization issues when trying to update DB2/400 from Excel, Access, or other PC technologies.

Errors are still possible with offline support, but they will most likely be the same type of application-related errors that users can also expect in online mode, he says. Users won't experience database-related errors because they are not directly accessing the database, but going through the application interface.

Other Version 8 Features

Looksoftware is making several other changes to its version 8 suite of products, including the addition of "drag and drop" events in newlook. This new feature, when it becomes available, will give developers the capability to attach macros or scripts to .NET screen controls or forms by simply dragging them across the screen. This feature will be supported only with certain objects, including listboxes, listviews, treeviews, datagrids, pictureboxes, panels, tabpages, and form objects, the company says.

Developers will also be able to programmatically create controls and have them placed on the form automatically using scripts in the "Designer" component of the suite in version 8. The new release will also allow the programmatic addition or removal of function keys from a form, without requiring the use of Designer. Additionally, the new SetActiveControl method will allow developers to override certain aspects of host applications.

Lastly, the company says it has boosted the performance and robustness of lookserver with version 8, and also added support for persistent sessions for hosting Web services created with the soarchitect.

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