🚀 go-pugleaf

Gary Long <garyl@magna.com> wrote:
>>
>>We are converting our existing COBOL/DB2/CICS apps to a Visual Basic
>>front-end (running on Win/NT or Win 3.11) but the data will remain in
>>DB2 on MVS.  
>
>Dave, it depends a lot on the type of application you are creating.  If it is 
>retrieval-intensive -- DSS or whatever -- then a DBMS gateway such as DDCS is 
>the right choice.  If it is transaction-oriented, then I highly recommend 
>IBM's CICS External Client Interface (ECI).
>For transacations, ECI is easy and clean.  Works like a charm.
>Only problem with the ECI is that it is C-oriented making it a little hard
>to use from PB or VB.  For our Application Generator we wrote a DLL to make 
>it easy (not a real big deal).

I wouldn't recommend from the very beginning to create smth aside of standards, write 
proprietary DLL which in the future definitely face some incompatibility problems with newer 
releases and thus restrict some newer features. There's ODBC standard, there's DRDA standard, 
why not use? Why become dependable of CICS logic? The advantage of ODBC-oriented approach is 
that your environment stays open, and it's not a problem in the future to add some new 
ODBC-compliant data source. There are lots of ODBC-compliant tools, I am not that sure about 
CICS-compliant ones.

6 months ago I've commited the project written just in VB with remote DB2. The main manual I 
used was ODBC reference, not even DB2 one!

Vadim