Tailoring
Tailoring your solution to a new platform may be as simple as reviewing these topics and ensuring you
have thought about what the solution would "look like to an iSeries customer." On the other hand,
there may be several things you want to do to provide instant familiarity for your application to
iSeries users. They will have certain
expectations for the 'tailoring' topics outline here. Some topics consider the application look and feel.
Others topics concern, for example, installation and operation. The ultimate objective is to leave you
with confidence that your solution will appeal to iSeries customers.
Licensing
An iSeries server provides facilities that permit you to license your software product in the same
manner in which iSeries products are licensed. These interfaces are provided as system APIs.
For more information,
see Software product APIs.
Installation and packaging
To make your application really successful, you need to be sure you have "put it all together" -- packaged your solution in a manner that is attractive to iSeries customers. The media, installation and maintenance, for example, can be done in ways that are familiar to them. There are several options and tools available for packaging and delivering iSeries applications.
The following, Application Packaging, presentation ( 848 KB) describes:
- How to meet the expectations of iSeries users and administrators
- Considerations for product maintenance and version control strategy
- iSeries CD-ROM mastering process (see also the information below)
- Which packaging method is best for your application?
- iSeries Navigator Plug-Ins
- Management Central Product Packager
- InstallShield Enterprise Multi-Platform Edition
If you choose to distribute your solution on CD-ROM. You will need to acquire the necessary
hardware and software to premaster and record a CD-ROM from your iSeries data.
A white paper, CD-ROM Premastering on iSeries, ( 57 KB) describes the process in detail.
General optical information and example premastering programs are
also in the"Using CD-ROM in Distributing iSeries software" white paper.
The Software product APIs may also be used for CD-ROM mastering and related tasks.
Several solutions are available for purchase:
Vendor: Agent Data ApS
Product: BlueCD
Distributed in the U.S. by Kisco Information Systems
Vendor: Bug Busters Software Engineering
Product: CD Builder
Vendor: Centerfield Technology, Inc. (formerly Bradenmark Software)
Product:CD-ROM Studio for the iSeries
Vendor: Mid-Comp International
Product: CD Mastering Software
Vendor: Bavarian Consulting, Inc.
Product: CD/IT
Vendor: SLIC Systems Ltd.
Product: CD Mastering System/400
Vendor: ConsulTech Information Systems, Inc.
Product: CDTools/400
Operations
There are two types of operator interfaces on iSeries servers today, text-based menus and commands, and a graphical interface. Both can be extended to provide application operations interfaces.
In addition, several scripting facilities are available on the server to facilitate system
operations.
The menus and command lines are the long-standing iSeries interfaces and are still used by
many customers. While not flashy, they facilitate solution developers and customers writing operational scripts
that can automate application use and minimize operator interventions, lowering cost of operations
for a particular application. The OS/400 Command Language (CL), REXX, QShell,
or PASE shell can be used for scripting the commands.
The graphical interface has been available for several years and is steadily growing in
popularity. With plug-in capabilities, applications can add their own operational interfaces. iSeries Navigator supports Java, VisualBasic, and C++ plug-ins.
There's a toolset that helps make developing a graphical user
interface for Java easier (GUIBuilder, Resource Script Converter and PCML to get/set data to
iSeries servers).
Scripting resources include:
Graphical interface resources include:
Redbook:
Systems Management on iSeries
iSeries workloads and performance
OS/400 provides many services for scheduling work and monitoring how the server is running.
An understanding of this information will help you leverage these built-in capabilities to fine tune
your solutions and increase your customers' satisfaction.
IBM operates
customer benchmark centers
specifically designed to prove real-world scalability. These facilities
operates on a cost-recovery basis. You can bring in your application and prove that a specific
configuration, with a specific level of processor, will perform as required for a customer
situation. It's a particularly powerful selling tool, as there is no guesswork involved.
Thousands of actual concurrent "users" can be set up in a laboratory environment.
Security
Server security on iSeries servers is one of the best in the industry. It is rooted in the object-based
architecture. This architecture provides integrated traditional OS/400 and UNIX-style
security functions and facilities. Some specific considerations for security ports are include
in the security section of the porting FAQs.
To understand these facilities and the iSeries security perspective, see:
National Language Support, internationalization, and unicode
Support for worldwide customers to work in their native languages has been a priority for iSeries
since its inception. Industry terms relating to this functional area -- internationalization
(I18N), national language support (NLS), national language versions (NLV), localization,
globalization -- are supported on different operating systems in different ways.
iSeries servers support multiple models -- a powerful, long-standing model that tags all data on the
server with its encoding, plus message catalog support standardized for UNIX systems. In addition,
many parts of OS/400 support Unicode.
Using these models and tools when designing or porting an application allows you to
internationalize your application and offer it to the entire iSeries customer base.
The following references are useful in understanding iSeries support for internationalization.
An iSeries server is an EBCDIC-based system, (however, some aspects of data representation are ASCII and Unicode).
Correspondingly, there are additional considerations for working with application data that may
already reside on the server.
Problem management
Problem management, in iSeries terms, includes learning how to retreive and respond
to messages. Messages may in found in one or more queues or logs:
- QSYSOPR (system operator) message queue
- Workstation (user) message queue
- Job log
- History log
Information sources for details of iSeries problem management:
To customize your solution to capture and report problems in an iSeries manner,
consider the OS/400
Problem Management APIs.
User Interface
The operations interfaces
discussed above includes a contemporary graphical user interface,
iSeries Navigator,
and a traditional text-mode
user interface consisting of commands and menus. There are tools to help application
providers create each of these interfaces.
In addition to these operational interfaces, there are
UNIX-style user interfaces.
These include X Window System libraries and Motif widgets and UNIX-style shells. In V5R2,
the internationalized curses library is also provided.
If you want to distribute the application user interface to a PC client or a web browser,
there is an extensive set of tools
available in products like the IBM Toolkit for Java and in web services and support that are built
into OS/400.
The IBM eServer Solutions Connection lists numerous
User Interface tools.
Database Access
DB2 UDB for iSeries is delivered with every iSeries server. It has been fully integrated
with OS/400 since the system's beginnings for enhanced security, save/restore operations, and
other system support functions for customers' data. OS/400 customers usually do not think of database
as a "tailoring" item for their application for this reason. However, for solutions that are
coming to iSeries servers from other platforms, the database choice may not be as obvious, and some
porting and tuning may be needed for database-specific usage in the solution.
For general information about DB2 UDB for iSeries, see:
For information about moving data between DB2 UDB for iSeries and other file formats, see
Parallel Data Loader ( 141 KB).
Printing
OS/400 provides a print spooling subsystem that can manage printing for you. To learn how to
leverage iSeries-specific print facilities, see the following:
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