Earlier this year, I created a no-charge sockets library for the iSeries. This library is named iSockets and is being used by some iSeries shops to access remote Web services from within their own RPG IV programs.

Recently, several users expressed an interest in modifying the code in iSockets to suit their custom requirements. To satisfy these requirements, I recently posted an update to iSockets on its Web site, iSockets.net.

The users wanted the ability to, with a single call to iSockets, access their remote Web services partner and receive the information into an RPG IV field.

The original version of iSockets allowed this but was restricted to some arbitrary length on the returned value. The updated version has eliminated the length restriction by requiring the address of a variable to be specified as a parameter instead of the parameter itself. This allows you to use %ALLOC() or other methods to allocate storage and pass that storage location (which could also be a memory-map file) to the procedure.

Here's the simplified code:

In this example, I'm pulling the main page from google.com into the RPG field named szHTML. The address of szHTML is passed to the POSTURLDATA subprocedure along with the maximum length that the variable can hold.

The number of iSockets users today is unknown since I don't require registration when you download the *SRVPGM object. But I can tell you it is a worldwide phenomenon—and it's free!