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5250 Bridge API

The 5250 Bridge API is a more flexible implementation of the Emulator's capabilities which allows you to access and customize the PHP/CSS and JavaScript code (also used by the emulator) to create additional functionality.
This is suitable for users who want to make cosmetic changes to their application and apply some additional display logic. In addition, users can choose to remove or filter out content/data for a subset of end-users (e.g. redundant fields) or even pipeline the data coming from the bridge for usage in other, non browser applications (Java, Web Services, others.). Also suitable for users who expect to continue significant development of their RPG 5250 applications and want to minimize their Parallel Maintenance considerations.

The 5250 Bridge API offers a number of functions/classes for PHP developers to grab fields and strings from an interactive (5250) program and wrap them into real web applications. This way you can seamlessly integrate output of green screen applications into your PHP Web application without the need to rewrite the business logic and directly access the database. Alternatively you can use the 5250 Bridge API to directly access the database and create completely new Web applications (e.g. omit certain fields or integrate fields from different screens into one).

The 5250 Bridge APIs have two interfaces: object oriented and procedural functions. If a developer is not comfortable using object oriented (class access) methods in PHP he can use regular procedural functions to access the same APIs.

The 5250 Bridge API accessed information in your 5250 application's input/output fields and allows you to use this information to 'transform' your application in PHP and HTML, while still using your 5250 back-end logic.

The Zend 5250 Bridge API has the following purposes:

Starting an interactive job or 5250 session.
Running IBM i interactive program or menu in an interactive job..
Accessing 5250 screen data such as screen size, input/output field values, size, location and attributes.
Updating input-field value content.
Sending updated input-fields to an interactive job.
Sending a function-key action to an interactive job.

Examples

To see examples of how the 5250 Bridge API can be used to web-enable your 5250 application, see the Applications.