KicksOut Demonstration
We have chosen the familiar sample application that was delivered with Telon as our demonstration application to show you how Kicks-Out converts this application to a web-enabled client/server application. Absolutely no touchup has been done on the result. Students build a variation of the app during Telon classes.
One of the most noticeable features of the Kicks-Out conversion is the blue space at the bottom of the screen containing information about the current field which has automatically been recovered from the legacy code. This will reduce your user training costs if you deploy the renovated application internally, or help your customers serve themselves if you choose to deploy it on the internet.
Also notice that Kicks-Out has automatically converted the function key information on the bottom of the screen into command buttons.
This demo acts a little bit like a PowerPoint presentation, although you are executing genuine Java applets. Unfortunately, our ISP does not have DB2 installed, so this portion of the demo must be canned rather than giving you live access to the sample database. The data that you see was created as a log file during a test of the whole converted application including database access.
Some features have been omitted from this demo that are included in the full product. For example, in the demo, you can enter invalid data in some fields even though the blue space explains the true requirements. In the full product, you will be notified audibly when an error is entered. For a demonstration of the full product, including live database access, please contact us through this form. Also in this demo the bluespace presents some ‘debugging’ information. This is most easily explained if you step though the demo while on the phone with us.
On the first screen, the menu, you can see the result of our design criteria that the user who is familiar with the legacy system is able to type in exactly the same sequence of keystrokes and get the same results as before the conversion, while at the same time taking advantage of the new platform's capabilities.2
Try typing an invalid character into the Function field: you should be warned with a beep, because the production version of this edit has been included. (Just in case you have sound turned off, "error beep" shows in the bluespace.) In the ID field it has not, so although the blue space tells you that all but the first character must be numeric, this is not enforced by the client program as it would be in the production version. We do allow you to continue working even after you have made an "error", just in case the legacy program bypasses the code that checks for the circumstance. The DB2 stored procedure or other mainframe program we generate is guaranteed to accept exactly the same data the legacy program did - editing on the PC is just a convenience.
Now try clicking on one of the buttons; whatever you typed on the screen will be overwritten with what was typed during the session which was canned. Also the PFKey you pressed, and the PFK the demonstrator pressed, are shown in the bluespace (or the PFKeys that other action events are translated into). The next action event will bring up the next screen in the demo.
The Telon 2.4 sample list screen had apparently been designed as a two-column list, but the total length of the fields had apparently created a compile error. CA chose to fix this by eliminating the second column. This made the 3270 screen look a little strange. To get back to the original intent, we restored the second column to the Telon program, shortening some of the long fields enough to eliminate the compile error. We then converted the restored Telon program, and made no changes whatsoever to the converted code.
The list screen shows our design philosophy most clearly. The repeating fields have been converted to a list box. Our customers have indicated that this is the way it should be done and have accepted the fact that the column headings no longer fit, and can easily be manually adjusted.
Try clicking on one of the input fields at the bottom of the screen. If no line in the list box is highlighted, nothing will happen. If you highlight a list item and click again, the selected list item will be chosen for the selected destination. All this was automatically generated.
On the add/update screen, the word 'add' or 'update' appears in a field rather than as a literal, because that is the way the mainframe screen was written. Manual adjustment of the properties of this field will cause the field to look like a literal as it did on the 3270. We chose colors for the demo for clarity rather than as our recommendations for a production system.
In this screen, we have provided the production validation of the state field; try typing one character into the field. If no states begin with this character, you should immediately get an error beep. If the first character defines the state uniquely, you should get a quite different 'good' beep, the second letter of the state is filled in for you, and you skip to the next field. If there are multiple states with the same first letter, the sublist is displayed. This is a better demonstration of the way we handle a "values list" than the one-character OPTION field on the menu. All this was generated automatically from the legacy code.
Wouldn't you like to have your legacy application running like this a month from now? Then you can start adding the kind of enhancements which you could never have done with the 3270 interface.
Notes:
2For the users who are already accessing legacy systems through 3270 emulation packages which map the enter key to newline and the Ctrl key to enter, this functionality has been added to Kicks-Out as an optional feature and is demonstrated here. For keyboards with 12 function keys, pressing Shift maps F1-F12 into PF13-PF24. For keyboards with 10 function keys, pressing Alt maps F1-F10 into PF11-PF20. Pressing Shift and Alt maps F1-F4 into PF21-PF24 and F5-F8 into the PA and clear keys. Also Pageup and Pagedown are mapped into PF7 and PF8, and other keys are mapped as appropriately as possible. These mappings can easily be changed to suit your users' preferences.
A
typical user's experience
Would screen-scraping work just
as well?