WebConnect Pro overview From OpenConnect Contact Mark Gibbs

Product Capsule Price: $595 per server plus $99 per simultaneous user. Requirements: For server, Windows NT 3.51 with Service Pack 2 or higher, with an SNA gateway. Rating Value for money: 4 Usefulness: 5 Quality: 3 Overall: 4 1 is poor; 5 is excellent.

By Mark Gibbs
IntraNet, 8/18/97

Are you looking for a way to unlock all that corporate data tied up in legacy mainframe systems? Then OpenConnect Systems, Inc. has a couple of products for you.

The first product, called OC://Web- Connect, turns legacy integration into yet another service that can be accessed via that Swiss Army knife of information systems, the Web browser.

Better still, a companion product, called OpenVista, makes it possible to transform the appearance and behavior of the legacy system so you can get a seamless transition between the PC and Big Iron worlds.

Companies traditionally have used terminal emulators to provide PC-based access to legacy systems. These products provide a window that emulates a 3270 or 5250 display. They connect to a mainframe through an SNA gateway.

Terminal emulators work fine, but they can be expensive to buy, deploy and maintain. That's one of the reasons the idea of using a Web browser has a lot of appeal.

One way of bringing legacy data onto an intranet is to translate the data into HTML. For this, a Web server back-end application talks to the SNA gateway and extracts the 3270 or 5250 screen data.

The application then translates the data to HTML and sends it to the browser. Users enter data in a form, which the browser sends to the server application as HTML. The application translates the HTML into the host format and sends it to the mainframe. Any browser can display and interact with the host data.

On the downside, this technique does not allow for real-time updates of the client screen by the mainframe - it negatively impacts performance by requiring that the client see the complete host screen for even minor changes and, perhaps most importantly, it can compromise security.

If the client fails to terminate a session, the server may leave the mainframe connection open until the back-end application declares a time-out and terminates the session.

While the session is open, the connection is vulnerable.

The use of Secure Sockets Layer or Secure HTTP removes a lot of the risk, but there are other considerations, too. The indeterminate status of sessions between requests also can tie up resources and reduce performance whenever sessions are incorrectly terminated.

OC://WebConnect gets around these problems by providing browser-based terminal-emulation services via a Java applet downloaded to each intranet client.

The OC://WebConnect server is a back-end application that provides the link to the SNA gateway and the persistent applet connection.

Following the Java security model, OC:// WebConnect runs on the same machine as the Web server delivering the Java applet.

A Java applet is only allowed to open a connection back to the machine from which it is downloaded.

The datastream between the OC://Web-Connect server and the Java applet is heavily encrypted.

OpenConnect uses public-key encryption and dynamically generated keys, eliminating the need for client configuration or storage of key data. And because all communications are done with persistent connections, the client's status is a known factor, which optimizes resource use.

For example, only the changes from host screen updates need to be sent to the applet. Testing, testing It took me no more than five minutes to install OC://WebConnect on my intranet.

The OC://WebConnect server, which is not only a broker for connections between the client applets and the SNA server but also a specialized Web server, installs as a Windows NT service.

The Web server component provides a management interface through which you can set the administrator password, define sessions to hosts, monitor current session activity and start and stop the server.

I connected to the OC://WebConnect server from a remote workstation, defined a VT220 session to a modem server on my network, and then initiated a new session. It worked, making this one of the easiest and smoothest product tests I've ever attempted.

Download time is negligible because the terminal-emulation applets are only approximately 35K bytes each, and the performance impact related to having the server component mediate the connection to the host is minimal.

Building links into Web pages to launch specific terminal sessions is easy. However, the paper documentation for OC: //WebConnect is poor and is not adequately supported by the far-too-brief online documentation.

Documentation drag

The documentation for OpenVista also is weak, making it difficult to understand all of its features. Nonetheless, this product is tremendously powerful.

With this tool, you specify which fields on the host screen map to which user interface elements displayed by the client applet, and you can add behavior. For example, you might remove the need for the user to know application names and simply present a list of choices.

Selecting an application name and options would send the required command line to the legacy system. Any intranet manager with a legacy access problem will probably be willing to sacrifice a little time learning how the product works, in exchange for the potential benefits it offers.

The version I tested - 2.6 - has some indefensibly rough edges, including the poor documentation.

But OpenConnect promises to improve the documentation and add other enhancements in Version 3, which is due out in the next month or so. The company says customers with Version 2.6 will get free upgrades.