On Wed, May 04, 2005 at 01:07:25PM -0500, Michael Halcrow wrote: > 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.
Heh. NASA could have used them a few years ago. NASA had very strict rules on what you had to do to make a change to the source for the Shuttle flight computers, but the NASAcrats were silent on changes to the object code. So engineers, pushed to get code ready for tight launch schedules, would patch the object. One of the reasons it took as long as it did to recover from Challenger had nothing to do with Challenger: the decided to use the hiatus to reverse engineer the object, and that took longer than recovering from Challenger. -- Charles Curley /"\ ASCII Ribbon Campaign Looking for fine software \ / Respect for open standards and/or writing? X No HTML/RTF in email http://www.charlescurley.com / \ No M$ Word docs in email Key fingerprint = CE5C 6645 A45A 64E4 94C0 809C FFF6 4C48 4ECD DFDB
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