Anatomy of an Open-Source Project
** This thread discusses the article: Anatomy of an Open-Source Project **
The selection lists with 5250, cursor sensitive subfile windows, are much more powerful than drop down lists which in lieu of AJAX type programming must all be sent down with the web page to display in the drop down window. But similarities of the interface are the least of it. It is the "stream" processing which in fact is not comparable at all. 5250 is sockets communications to a resident session. HTML is, well, it's a kludge pushed into doing things it was never designed to do. That's why the security nightmare known as ActiveX was used and required Windows and Internet Explorer for a so called access from anywhere solution known as the browser. Now Flash is used instead most of the time. Flash is a native program running in a browser. SAP is going to it for an interface, for example. So anyone doing less is just behind the eight ball to start with. AJAX just compounds that kludge infinitely. Does anyone have any idea what must take place on the server every time an AJAX request is sent? A similar situation would exist if 5250 went to keystroke processing. With careful design AJAX requests could occur no more frequently than a page refresh and bring down less data, and the same could be said of 5250 keystroke processing. But these type of processing requests tend to generate lots of request traffic to the server for most purposes. So no, unfortunately for web browser advocates, there is no comparison to the stream processing of 5250 and HTML, and 5250 has more powerful interface processing than a web browser. Obviously we could use better font, color, and layout control, but even there the same thing can be said about a browser, which was never intended to have the layout control asked of it. It's kludge upon kludge to have what has been done with it, remarkable as it is. rd
** This thread discusses the article: Anatomy of an Open-Source Project **
The selection lists with 5250, cursor sensitive subfile windows, are much more powerful than drop down lists which in lieu of AJAX type programming must all be sent down with the web page to display in the drop down window. But similarities of the interface are the least of it. It is the "stream" processing which in fact is not comparable at all. 5250 is sockets communications to a resident session. HTML is, well, it's a kludge pushed into doing things it was never designed to do. That's why the security nightmare known as ActiveX was used and required Windows and Internet Explorer for a so called access from anywhere solution known as the browser. Now Flash is used instead most of the time. Flash is a native program running in a browser. SAP is going to it for an interface, for example. So anyone doing less is just behind the eight ball to start with. AJAX just compounds that kludge infinitely. Does anyone have any idea what must take place on the server every time an AJAX request is sent? A similar situation would exist if 5250 went to keystroke processing. With careful design AJAX requests could occur no more frequently than a page refresh and bring down less data, and the same could be said of 5250 keystroke processing. But these type of processing requests tend to generate lots of request traffic to the server for most purposes. So no, unfortunately for web browser advocates, there is no comparison to the stream processing of 5250 and HTML, and 5250 has more powerful interface processing than a web browser. Obviously we could use better font, color, and layout control, but even there the same thing can be said about a browser, which was never intended to have the layout control asked of it. It's kludge upon kludge to have what has been done with it, remarkable as it is. rd
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