International Business Machines Corporation

Mark Anthony McMillan

David Blair Gilgen

Brian Thomas Webb

Thomas Joseph Brawn

A technique, system, and computer program for enabling workstation software applications to efficiently and reliably use legacy host application data streams, without requiring change to the host applications. This is achieved by defining attributes of presentation spaces (screens or parts of screens) that are of interest to the workstation application, defining target objects to process the legacy host data, registering these attribute definitions and corresponding target objects with a screen recognition object, using the screen recognition object to monitor the host data streams for occurrence of a registered screen, and generating an asynchronous event to invoke the target object when a registered screen is detected. The efficiency is obtained because the workstation application programmer no longer has to write code to monitor the host data streams for the screens of interest. The reliability is obtained because the application programmer now reliably knows when a screen of interest appears in the host data stream.

Host application presentation space recognition producing asynchronous events

The present invention extends the concept of drag and drop metaphors, which are common in a workstation environment, to non-programmable terminals such as 3270 terminals. This allows the ease of use and convenience of a workstation environment to interact with a non-programmable terminal emulation session such that older technology interfaces can take advantage of the usability of a workstation.

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Raleigh, NC, United States of America

Mark Anthony McMillan