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Wondering About IBM WebFacing?

The history, prerequisites and resources you need

The IBM WebFacing Tool converts existing 5250 user interfaces to Web-based GUIs, so that with little or no modification to your original applications, anyone with a Web browser can access them. To help you get started quickly, WebFacing has user-friendly cheat sheets and wizards that guide you through selecting your application's data description specifications (DDS) and user interface manager (UIM) help panel source members, converting the source into Web pages, and deploying the new browser-based interface to your program as a Web application.

WebFacing is now part of IBM Rational Host Access Transformation Services (HATS). HATS is a cost-effective product for modernizing your System z and IBM i applications. This article provides a brief history of WebFacing, the packaging and prerequisites, and resources to learn more.

A Brief History of WebFacing

In the mid-1990s, while porting IBM CODE/400 Design Screen Utility (DSU) to CODE/400 Designer, an IBM developer proposed an interesting idea to easily bring IBM AS/400* applications to the Web. The initial prototype was based on an export function in the new Designer. Just before the new millennium, IBM started shipping WebFacing version 1. It was based on version 0.94 of what’s now known as Eclipse, and later versions shipped as part of the IBM WebSphere Development Studio Client (WDSC) on a real Eclipse platform. Those early versions of WebFacing depended on the DDS parser in CODE/400 Designer to fetch and parse the DDS source. The conversion, while written in Java, used Java Native Interface (JNI) to talk to the DDS DOM in the Designer runtime. It didn’t exactly have stellar conversion speed, taking many minutes to convert a large file. WebFacing achieved a significant speed increase when Designer was modified to emit XML representing the parsed DDS. In the conversion side of things, WebFacing inserted an XML parser to reproduce the DDS DOM in Java. Conversions that had taken minutes now took seconds or less.

WDSC 5.0 Advanced Edition (AE) added preconverted DDS-based system screens and the capability to render UIM-based system screens with dynamic data stream transformation, as well as support for IBM WebSphere Portal. In WDSC 5.1.2, the basic WebFacing project became Struts based, removing that particular difference between standard and AE. In WDSC 6, WebFacing was finally changed to use a Java DDS parser that used WDSC communications, thus removing the last dependencies on CODE/400 Designer and the old CODE communications. Prior to WebFacing version 6, the Web Settings feature had changed with each release, so with this version came some stability in that area. In version 6.0.1, WebFacing introduced the capability to handle unconverted DDS using dynamic data stream transformation, and the WebFacing server was enhanced to support connections from HATS as well. The display of unconverted DDS-based screens required the purchase of an IBM WebFacing Deployment Tool for WebSphere Development Studio with HATS technology (WDHT) runtime license.

WDSC 7.0 turned out to be the last release that included WebFacing; it was also the first release of the tool that required a complete runtime license. However, it also sported much-improved handling of UIM-based system screens and unconverted DDS screens from IBM i 5.4 and later versions of the host operating system, by providing the capability to link a WebFacing project with a HATS project and exploit the best of both modernization technologies. Version 7.0 also improved the handling of bidirectional (bidi) languages, removing significant roadblocks in the use of bidi with WebFacing.

With version 7.1 came a major repackaging of the IBM i tools and, as a result, WebFacing was shipped as part of the HATS toolkit. At the same time, WebFacing rolled the AE features into a single edition. HATS 7.1 also brought along the application bridge, which enabled an IBM i application to communicate with another Web application using WebFacing.

The latest release of the IBM WebFacing Tool, included in HATS 7.5, has all the features of earlier releases, many bug fixes, styling and performance improvements as well as the capability to run in the Firefox browser.

To read about the latest WebFacing features and how you can use them to modernize your IBM i applications, read “Web-Enable IBM i Applications With New WebFacing Features” in the September issue of IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems — IBM i edition.

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