‘No Stinkin’ Screen Scrapers’ Tour Launched by ASNA

February 14, 2012 Alex Woodie

Don’t expect to see any screen scrapers during ASNA‘s “No Stinkin’ Screen Scrapers Here” tour, which began last week in sunny Florida.

Screen scrapers? We don’t need no stinkin’ screen scrapers! That’s the rallying cry behind ASNA’s latest round of workshops, which explore the ways that its Wings modernization tool can spruce up older-looking IBM i apps constrained by those ugly, green 5250 interfaces.

Almost everybody in the IBM i community loves to hate screen scrapers, a class of tool that quickly renders 5250 screens in as graphical interfaces. What screen scrapers gain an IBM i shop in speed, however, is quickly canceled out by an overall lack of polish and usability. Screen-scraped interfaces often function just like their green counterparts, and deliver no additional functionality.

ASNA’s Wings employs a combination of Microsoft .NET and IBM Rational Open Access: RPG Edition technologies to modernize 5250 display files with Web browser interfaces. Wings generates new IBM i interfaces in ASP.NET, and opens the way for users to apply all sorts of ASP.NET controls to add Web 2.0 capabilities to their lovely new screens. More advanced users can use Microsoft’s Visual Basic, C#, or ASNA’s Visual RPG (AVR) to extend the Wings interfaces even more.

During the upcoming “No Stinkin’ Screen Scrapers Here” workshop in Las Vegas on February 24, ASNA will be exploring the capabilities of Wings, and explaining how the state of modernization tools has evolved from the bad old days of quick and dirty screen scrapers.

The free workshops are hosted by ASNA’s Tim Jannsen or Roger Pence, and feature hands-on tutorials using Wings with an actual RPG app running on IBM i. Next week’s workshop goes from 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Pacific Time, and also includes lunch and a door prize.

For more information or to register for the workshop, see ASNA’s website at www.asna.com.