The Four Hundred

OS/400 shops using, and software houses peddling, green-screen applications have lots of ways to put a graphical front end on those applications that gives them the modern Windows or HTML look that users expect these days. Jacada, which has been selling tools for modernizing 3270 and 5250 apps for more than a decade, will today launch Jacada Studio for iSeries, a development tool that allows shops with RPG and COBOL applications to leverage their skills in those languages to create new GUI applications.

All other things being equal, AS/400 and iSeries shops and the business partners who sell applications into the OS/400 base would probably just prefer to keep coding in RPG or COBOL for their business logic and then use screen scrapers to give these applications a pretty face. It is, in fact, the easiest way to go graphical. But all things are not equal.

Screen scraping--especially the rudimentary kind that was available several years ago--can be rigid, in terms of how the elements on different screens can be merged and moved around, but judging from some of the demonstrations I saw at COMMON last week, many iSeries partners have gotten around these limitations. Companies can, of course, go the route of developing JavaServer Pages and installing middleware to support those JSPs (IBM's WebSphere is but one possible choice), or use Microsoft's Active Server Pages and its middleware stack in a hybrid OS/400-Windows solution. The JSP and ASP routes involve a different programming paradigm, so this is not easy to do, and it is not free.

Any time an OS/400 application uses the 5250 data stream to pass data to and from users from the server, IBM invokes the green-screen tax. Customers who want to use screen scrapers have to pay for interactive processing capacity to feed their screens, and this can add up to much more money than is invested in the base AS/400 or iSeries server they use to support their databases. This, more than any other factor, is what will drive many customers to approaches to getting graphical that bypass that 5250 interface. Jacada is counting on this fact, and the desire of RPG and COBOL programmers to use the skills they have in creating green screens, to create graphical screens with Jacada Studio for iSeries.

Jacada Studio for iSeries builds on the experience that the company has gained by launching Jacada Innovator, a middleware program and development tool launched in May 2000 that allowed OS/400 customers to effectively replace calls to the 5250 data stream with calls to the Jacada Server that is in one way or another at the heart of Jacada's tools. The program also builds on Jacada Interface Server, which started shipping in September 2001. Jacada Interface Server is an amalgam of Jacada's tools, including the core Jacada server, the Jacada for Java, Jacada for Visual Basic, and Jacada for HTML development tools, and the Jacada Connects middleware for linking distributed applications together, and the Jacada for Palm wireless middleware. Jacada Interface Server also debuted with a new knowledge base and repository that sets user interface standards that programmers use in developing applications. Jacada Interface Server includes an interface development kit that is used to create screens for both legacy and new applications, in RPG, COBOL, Java, .NET, and any other thing that comes along, including XML support, which was new in Jacada products with the launch of the Interface Server this time last year.

Jacada Studio for iSeries is, unlike these two other products, focused on creating new graphical applications. These new applications are created using database schema information extracted from existing applications and pulled into the knowledge base that was at the heart of Jacada Interface Server and is central to Jacada Studio for iSeries as well. Jacada Studio for iSeries imports file definitions from host applications as a starting point, and creates a central repository of the fields that are available throughout those applications. The knowledge base also has a bunch of predefined graphical elements that developers using the tool can choose from to paint entirely new screens, which can be in Java or HTML formats. These screens are not deployed through a 5250 protocol, but through a TCP/IP and sockets connection. In addition to the graphical interface, Jacada Studio also generates an RPG or COBOL program shell that is a starting point for an OS/400 developer. From this point on, the developer adds business logic and database management commands to this shell program. The reading and writing of data to and from the interface is managed within this shell program in the same fashion that data would be managed in a green screen (using native database I/O in RPG, COBOL, or SQL), but without invoking the 5250 data stream. Jacada Studio uses the same development style as interactive programming, but relies on Jacada's middleware instead of OS/400's. As far as OS/400 knows, when the screens generated by Jacada Studio are hitting its databases, it is running a batch job.

Jacada Studio for iSeries includes the Jacada Interface Server, and it is priced more aggressively than prior Jacada tools. A base Jacada Studio license for up to five developer workstations costs $995 for a P05-class AS/400 or iSeries server. The Interface Server, which is written in Java, has been tested on OS/400, Windows, and Solaris, but can be deployed on any Java-compatible Unix or mainframe server, if customers require it. Customers who want to develop right on their production iSeries machines can buy a development server license for Jacada Studio for iSeries for $5,000. Pricing for the deployment server that supports the deployed applications that have been created using the tool is based on IBM's software tiers; as an example, in the P10 group, this deployment server costs $10,000. Today, Jacada will also announce a special introductory price for Jacada Studio for iSeries--we'll keep you posted on that--and it is also offering a 30-day full-evaluation copy, including technical support and a step-by-step multimedia tutorial that shows how to create graphical extensions to an RPG program.

Jacada Studio for iSeries requires an AS/400 or iSeries server of any vintage running OS/400 V4R2 or higher and in the P05 tier or higher. The development workstation that companies use has to have a 200 MHz Pentium or faster chip with at least 64 MB or memory (128 MB is recommended); Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, Windows 2000, and Windows XP operating systems are supported on the developer workstation. Jacada suggests that developers have at least 200 MB of disk space, and they also need a browser--Internet Explorer 4.01 or higher or Netscape 4.06 or higher--and a TCP/IP connection to the iSeries or AS/400 server as well. The HTML screens generated by Jacada Studio for iSeries will run in these browsers, and the Java screens (if customers opt for these) will run in any JVM-capable browsers.