[Mpls-pm] Mainframe communications in Perl?

[Jim Anderson]

On Wed, Feb 22, 2006 at 11:10:41AM -0600, Joshua ben Jore wrote:
> On 2/22/06, Jim Anderson <jim at acadcam.com> wrote:
> > I have a potential need to use a perl program to run an application on a
> > mainframe (using a 3270 protocol) and grabbing some of the screen data
> > that shows up.
> >
> > Does anybody have any idea if this is possible?  I'd need to establish a
> > connection, log in, start the remote application, fill in a field, push
> > the request, and then save the results that come back.  I would probably
> > want to make multiple data requests in the same session.
> 
> If nothing else, how about Expect?

Could be.  My problem is that the mainframe is somewhere down in Tennessee,
and the PCs that would communicate with it are also down there, and I have
little to no access to them from here.  And I have done no mainframe
communications before, so I don't have any idea what I need to do.  I'm
guessing there's a good chance that if I communicate directly, I'll be
needing to do ASCII/EBCDIC conversions, but I don't know if special protocol
steps are involved.

-- 
Jim Anderson                    (612) 782-0456     jim at acadcam.com
Anderson CAD/CAM, Inc           Lucifer designed MS-DOS to try
2500 Highway 88, Suite 108          men's souls.
St Anthony, MN  55418           Then he had a better idea...