Companies that utilize Enterprise Information Systems on the iSeries have made a substantial investment in both hardware and application programs. Over the course of time the green screen applications have been tailored for the specific organizational needs.

With the development of the Internet, the Enterprise Information Systems are now required to implement Business-to-Business and/or Business-to-Client functionality to compete in the market. This results in the situation where the company has to decide whether to replace a perfectly good system with a web-based system, retrain and/or replace their existing I.T. staff in the latest web-savvy languages, or stay with existing infrastructure and be out-maneuvered by competition that provides faster, more efficient interaction with customers and business partners.

Rather than discard existing hardware, years of application development effort and the experienced staff that maintains them, iSeries-based companies now have the option to leverage and extend their existing investment by Web-enabling their iSeries applications with the IBM WebFacing Tool.

What is the WebFacing Tool? The WebFacing Tool is a feature of the IBM WebSphere Development Studio Client for iSeries (WDSc). This tool provides a method to rapidly Web-enable existing iSeries applications to a browser-based HTML interface with little or no modification to the original (RPG or COBOL) application

The WebFacing Tool builds Web enabled interfaces to the existing 5250 (green screen) applications based on the source code of the 5250 display files. The conversion process typically requires little to no modification to the existing iSeries program. The resulting application continues to support the DDS display source files, while also supporting a Web interface. Based on the DDS display source files, the IBM WebFacing Tool creates standard JavaServer Pages, Java beans, and servlets that can run in any Java-compliant application server. Users can evoke the application from either a browser or a traditional green screen terminal.

Services provided by Infoview: Infoview Systems provides full range of services for the IBM WebSphere WebFacing product:

• Creates browser-based interfaces to the existing 5250 applications
• Hosting of the Web components and iSeries host components
• Education

System requirements

• OS/400 V4R5M0 or later with all relevant PTFs applied
• Current source code (DDS) for all display files in the application that is WebFaced

• Any application server or servlet/JSP container that supports Java Servlet 2.3 or later and JavaServer Pages 1.2 or later or WebSphere application server 3.5.3 or later

• Windows 98, NT, XP, 2000 or ME.
• Internet Explorer V5.0 or later

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