>In my opinion, people will NEVER get excited about using mainframes as long >as they have no option but to work with the default interface.
I agree with that. Here's what's happening. There's some interesting work afoot on the "new face of the mainframe," and I know many people have heard about the work in this area at SHARE and other conferences. This is the year when that work bears fruit. Candle was perhaps IBM's best ever acquisition, by the way. IBM is promoting Vanguard's RACF graphical management tools very aggressively. Development tooling has also been totally revamped around Eclipse. You set a breakpoint in COBOL exactly the same way as you do in Java now. (It's uncanny.) CA just announced an Eclipse plug-in for Endevor, so that helps even more shops. There have also been rumblings of 3270 user interface discontinuance for certain subsystems (or parts of subsystems). CICS V3R2 is one example where you'll start to see that happen. The (controversial, yes) HMC just got revamped with System z9. It's worth mentioning that the second Web server in the world ran on a mainframe (at Stanford), and the first Web application (i.e. more than static content) was a pre-CGI application at CERN that provided Web access to a VM find program. Mainframes have been doing GUI for a long, long time -- and Web longer than Solaris, Windows, or just about anything else (except NeXT UNIX). But the GUI movement for routine system management and development has come hot and heavy for the past couple years, and you're going to see more of that this year. This issue is partly a challenge for mainframe organizations. If users want Web interfaces, make sure you deliver them. It's very, very easy to do almost instantly. (HATS is an excellent example, and it runs very well indeed on z/OS or Linux on z.) Do it. Mainframes are as youthful as you want them to be. - - - - - Timothy F. Sipples Consulting Enterprise Software Architect, z9/zSeries IBM Japan, Ltd. E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
