On Mon, May 02, 2005 at 02:16:07PM -0600, Scott Pepperdine wrote: > Merrill Oveson wrote: > >What's a screen scraper? > In my world (IBM midrange - AS400/iSeries)
Nice machines, I might add.
> a screen scraper is an application that sits between the Internet
> and 'legacy' applications running on big iron. The screen scraper
> interprets the screen information coming from the legacy
> application, usually in a 5250 or 3270 data stream, converts it to
> html and presents it as a GUI. The user does their thing and the
> screen scraper posts their input back to the legacy application.
> Screen scrapers vary quite a bit in their sophistication level and
> the quality of their appearance. It's a quick way to get on the
> 'net' without re-writing the old application.
And more often than not, retrofitting is not an option, since the
source code is often no longer in anyone's possession. My compiler
theory prof at UT Austin mentioned that, for any given major banking
institution, the source code for something like 20% of the
applications that are managing the bank's operations is totally lost.
Nobody has any idea where the source code is. There are a few
companies here in Austin that specialize in code transformation and
reverse compiling, and they make a healthy profit for their services.
Mike
.___________________________________________________________________.
Michael A. Halcrow
Security Software Engineer, IBM Linux Technology Center
GnuPG Fingerprint: 419C 5B1E 948A FA73 A54C 20F5 DB40 8531 6DCA 8769
"Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died."
- Erma Bombeck
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