x 3270 Reloaded Conquering the Mainframe Abhay Pradhan Aditya Godbole Infosys Technologies Limited

x3270 Reloaded Conquering the Mainframe Abhay Pradhan Aditya Godbole Infosys Technologies Limited

Agenda Mainframes – An evolving dinosaur? Mainframe projects in Indian IT Companies x3270 – Background Pros / Cons of x3270 Deployment within Infosys X-ite : x3270 on Cygwin Statistics Screenshots The road ahead

An evolving Dinosaur? Fact: More than 70 % of the world's data still resides on mainframes. Fact: Business verticals such as airlines, railways, banks and financial institutions continue to use mainframes Fact: IBM with its zSeries is actively pushing Linux on the mainframe. Fact: With terabytes of data to deal with, corporations still prefer a centralized data processing center rather than a distributed client server model.

Indian IT Companies Numerous projects came in during the Y2K scare This in turn led to a lot of repeat business Mainframe Projects are still in the pipeline Broadly Categorized into Maintenance Systems re-engineering (Database Migration, MQSeries, CICS Web Services) Conversion from one language to another Suits the Global Delivery Model that Infosys follows

Connectivity Various commercial software is used such as Extra Personal Client (EPClient) and Mochasoft. These proprietary clients cost money. To achieve quality standards (SEI CMM-5), projects have to ensure that they have the required number of software licenses. Affects the operating margin of projects. Enter x3270.

x3270 Background x3270 is an IBM 3270 terminal emulator for the X Window System x3270 runs over a TELNET connection, emulating either an IBM 3279 (color) or 3278 (monochrome) x3270 can also be used to access AS400 systems x3270 is distributed as source code and can be used for free. Current maintainer – Paul Mattes Website - http://x3270.bgp.nu/

x3270 Features TN3270E protocol is fully supported Can be compiled with SSL Russian, Turkish, Hebrew, Chinese and Japanese character sets supported IND$FILE file transfer Scrollbar to view previous screens (helpful for viewing maps) Save screenshots to a text file Excellent scripting facilities Pop up keypad with 3270 specific keys

x3270 on Cygwin x3270 compiles and runs under Cygwin Cygwin was already being used within Infosys as an alternative to Exceed A category (101-Infosys) was created for the installer to allow easy installation Dependencies were taken care of. Clicking on x3270 automatically selected all packages which x3270 needed (changed Cygwin's setup.ini) Started actively pushing x3270 as an alternative to commercial mainframe clients

Pros Excellent scripting facilities. Scripts could be written in any language Highly configurable. Users could map x3270 specific actions to keys they were comfortable with. e.g. We mapped Ctrl-F to do a find within ISPF Lightweight Can be tailored to suit Infosys's needs Active community support, a lot faster than calling the Customer Care of commercial clients

And the Cons GUI uses a very old toolkit (Xt). Look and feel is different than windows Dependency on Cygwin: users need to be comfortable with another application Screen resizing is a problem Fonts are an issue. Does not use scalable fonts Windows users prefer a point and click approach to configure any application. In x3270, the config file has to be edited by hand

Enhancements to x3270 One fine day,we decided to start improving x3270 Started adding features slowly Persistent Inserts Send Monocase Spreadsheet compatibility mode Scripting API in Perl written Macro recording framework Cygwin post install scripts for x3270 to give users a default working x3270 installation

Enhancements contd... More features... Ported other packages to Cygwin Xdialog package ported over to Cygwin along with its Perl wrapper UIDialog Wrote simple scripts to demonstrate scripting flexibility Created a new package X-ite which would automatically install and configure x3270 Enhancements were made after discussions with Paul Mattes and the patches have been submitted to him Even submitted an x3270 bug to him :)

Design considerations The macro recording framework had to be Modular Flexible Consistent with the existing functionality Should not have any external dependencies Could be deployed with ease

Macro recording framework x3270 Configuration file Macro rec framework Script playback Default paths and conversion script name Keystroke file x3270 perl API Conversion script Runnable script (perl)

Scripting in x3270 x3270 pipes data using two environment variables This allows us flexibility in selecting any language to push data to and fro x3270. We chose Perl Two basic scripting modes Peer scripting: runs x3270 as a child of another process Child scripting: x3270 Script() command One “talks” to x3270 with the help of “commands” i.e. emulator actions such as Connect(), String(“foo”) etc. x3270 always sends back a status message Thus using a combination of Perl + x3270 scripting commands one can automate a lot of tasks

X-ite (x3270 Reloaded) Packaged x3270 with a new name, X-ite X-ite is a community project within Infosys following the Bazaar model: The developers have never met! No hierarchy within the project :) With InfyLUG's help, developed a webpage for X-ite Dedicated IRC channel CVS repository for X-ite development Mailing list to push out X-ite news as well as to handle X-ite related queries Call center for X-ite? :)

X-ite statistics Currently around 100 users are using X-ite X-ite has actually spiked Cygwin usage (~= 400 users) Estimated savings to Infosys is approximately: 100 users x $1000 (per license) = $100,000 X-ite following the Debian model, changes move from: Unstable (personal machines) to Testing (102-Infosys) and finally Stable (101-Infosys). The features we added are currently in testing.

The Road Ahead Push X-ite as the default mainframe client to trainees Submit more patches/bugs to Paul Port Tcl/Tk to Cygwin to decrease dependency on UIDialog X-ite does not have an in built ftp client.. More scripts to be written in Perl Certain projects cannot install X-ite because of firewall restrictions.. Cygwin CD with X-ite? X-ite configurator (written in Qt)

Thanks to.. Linux Bangalore 2004, for allowing us a chance to talk Infosys, for sponsoring us Mahendra and Natarajan, (InfyLUG) for website space, CVS access and a lot of hand holding. Rajesh, for letting us fiddle around with his precious Cygwin mirrors and the Cygwin installer Toufeeq, for being the uncomplaining dogsbody, trying to port various packages to cygwin Project mates at Hyd who have been our beta testers, never complaining when X-ite crashed due to our changes Our respective PM's for allowing us the freedom to do this project

Questions?

x 3270 Reloaded Conquering the Mainframe Abhay Pradhan Aditya Godbole Infosys Technologies Limited