Hi
Well I had hoped to be a bit further along with the project to enhance my Software Manager Product with a PHP interface using the 5250 bridge, but a couple of things are bogging me down at the moment. Firstly the documentation available and the examples need a bit of work to be able to make sense of the best practice for implementing the bridge, I have asked a couple of sources in Zend to help me identify the best practices and will post those when I have them. We have also decided to take the plunge and go for a ZendFramework based solution just so we can test out the concepts, but we are struggling with the RewriteRule implementation at the moment. What seems to work on our V5R4 system isn’t working on the V6R1 system, I am sure its a setting somewhere but at the moment I get loop errors where the RewriteRule is causing too many rewrites!
The concepts of the ZendFramework look like a good idea and reuseability will be greatly enhanced in projects where you have lots of code to generate, I am not sure the Software Packaging Manager project will have the same results but we should be able to see some of the proposed benefits even if they are on a much smaller scale.
The plan is to start publishing the code and structure once it works, hopefully that wont be too far away! The initial design we made may have to change simply because of the implementation requirements of the Framework and 5250 bridge but that’s the same for any project where you simply make random choices based on limited information. If this was a properly funded project I am sure we would still be arguing about the technology to use let alone how to implement the solution using it!
I will keep you all updated as I move along.
Chris…