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Why Web-Enabled Screens Need to Look and Function Like Standard Web Applications

September 9th, 2010 No comments

If you are evaluating Presto or are already using it I recommend reading this article written by Duncan Kenzie, our CTO and President of Technical Services. It helps you build a strong business case for using web enabling solutions and it also gives you a list of examples of the types of screen enhancements that are possible with Presto.  Here is the first paragraph and you can read the full article on the System iNetwork website.

Why Web-Enabled Screens Need to Look and Function Like Standard Web Applications

Many IBM i shops consider implementing web-enabling solutions with the initial goals of giving their green screens a Windows look and of making them accessible in browsers. Most web-enabling solutions do provide modern looking screens that are more accepted by users, easier to access, and easier to deploy. However, these are often not strong enough reasons for you to purchase web-enabling software. To build a stronger business case, web-enabled screens need to make users more productive, reduce training costs, and provide new functionality. This means they need to look and function as much as possible like standard web applications.

Read Full Article…

Categories: Presto Tags:

Join BCD for 2 Webcasts at RPG & Beyond

September 8th, 2010 No comments

Join Duncan Kenzie, BCD’s CTO and President of Technical Services, for the following two webcasts he will be presenting as part of the RPG & Beyond Web Conference for which BCD is a Platinum Sponsor.

1. No more green screens. Fantasy? Reality? Necessity?
When: Wednesday, Sept. 15 – 12:30 PM Eastern
Description: Industry expert Bob Cozzi will discuss whether moving completely away from green screens and going to the web is achievable or even necessary. In the second half of this webcast Duncan Kenzie will show you how you can move away from green screens by instantly giving all your 5250 screens a web GUI with Presto.
Enroll here.

2. Learn how IBM’s MySQL support for the i helps you develop flexible long term solutions
When: Wednesday, Sept. 22 – 12:30 PM Eastern
Description: IBM’s MySQL support for the i helps you develop flexible long term solutions. You can start taking advantage of MySQL because you already have most of the tools to do this, using your existing IBM i hardware and software ecosystem. Join Duncan Kenzie who will explain the benefits of using MySQL and how it fits with DB2, RPG and PHP.
Enroll here.

Stop giving a rendering option to IE 8 users

June 17th, 2010 No comments

IE 8 has the dubious advantage of multiple rendering engines to choose from via the “Compatibility Mode” options. Personally, I like this feature, but what I’ve discovered is that a lot of users don’t know this feature exists which leads to the problem of them viewing everything in IE 7 mode by having the “Display all websites in Compatibilty View” setting turned on.

I’m not sure if this option is turned on by default on a fresh install of IE 8 or if users turn it on when they setup IE 8 for the first time (and I mean really, who wouldn’t choose compatibility?). The bottom line though, is if a user has upgraded to IE 8 you want to give them the best experience you can by using the most modern rendering engine.

Microsoft gave us a way to specify the rendering engine by using the X-UA-Compatible http header or meta tag. You can use this to force IE 8 to use the IE 8 rendering mode even if the user has compatibility mode turned on. So, if you’re building a new site, why give your IE 8 users the option to render your beautiful css and html in IE 7 mode?

Here’s how to use the meta-tag option, this tag should be at the top of the <head> section of your page:

<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=8″ />

Or you can set the http header in your Apache config:

Header onsuccess set “X-UA-Compatible” “IE=8″

If you want to limit the http header to a subset of your domain you can use environment variables in Apache:

SetEnvIf Request_URI “/myapp/” is_my_app=1

Header onsuccess set “X-UA-Compatible” “IE=8″ env=is_my_app

Considerations for running Presto applications in Chrome

June 3rd, 2010 No comments

We recently learned something you should be aware of if some of your user base accesses your Presto applications in Google’s Chrome.

A few days ago we ran into a CSS anomaly between two versions of Chrome. One of the things which complicated the process of finding the source of the problem was the fact that Chrome [almost invariably] auto-updates itself silently to the latest version. This process of automatic silent upgrading has some consequences for people deploying web applications targeted at Chrome:

  • Almost no one runs an ‘old’ version of Chrome more than once. Every time you use it, it checks for a new version. If it finds one, it updates itself.
  • We test out products against the version of Chrome current at the time the product version is released. With IE and FireFox we usually have ample lead time before a new browser is coming out to make sure things still appear as expected, and usually the adoption rate of the new version is relatively gradual, meaning the impact on your application is smaller and delayed. With the auto-upgrade option in Chrome, this may not always be the case. Furthermore Google doesn’t seem to officially provide older versions to test against.
  • It is technically possible to turn off the auto-updating process, but most end-users will not have done this.

Of course, we expect that a large company attempting to produce a credible browser will do their best to not change or break existing functionality. But as in the case we recently ran into, they don’t always succeed. So if a significant portion of your Presto application user base is using Chrome (or you have no control over the browser they use) you might want to keep a close eye on how Chrome renders your critical applications as the new browser versions roll out.

Categories: Presto Tags: ,

Reface or Rebuild your RPG Applications to the Web – Webinar May 27th

May 27th, 2010 No comments

If you want to know the pros and cons of refacing your IBM i applications and of rebuilding them as new web applications be sure to attend this webinar. In the first half Craig Pelkie discusses the pros and cons of web enabling and rebuilding, programming languages and technologies that are the best fit for RPG programmers for modernizing, and the benefits of writing stateless web applications.

In the second half, Duncan Kenzie, President and CTO of BCD Technical Services, presents three proven approaches you can take with BCD’s IBM i modernization products that help you rapidly deliver web applications that leverage your existing RPG skills and code. BCD’s Presto, WebSmart PHP and WebSmart ILE have helped 1,000′s of IBM i installations and 1,000′s of RPG programmers meet their modernization goals.

When: May 27, 2010 12 PM Eastern (New York)
Register: http://systeminetwork.com/civicrm/event/info?reset=1&id=711

30+ Cheat Sheets for Web Developers

May 11th, 2010 No comments

One of our developers just posted this link to our internal blog:

http://www.webaxes.com/2010/05/30-cheat-sheets-for-web-developers-and-designers/

This site has over 30 cheat sheets for web developers, including Dreamweaver, Fireworks, WordPress, jQuery and several for CSS, PHP and HTML.

Real world Presto app will be shown in webinar tomorrow

April 20th, 2010 No comments

If you want to see how an iSeries shop is using Presto attend tomorrow’s webinar at 10 PDT. K3S will show their Presto web enabled inventory management solution for the first 15 minutes of the webinar. It includes some very impressive screens that have been nicely formatted, have menus as buttons, hover over tips, a graph to show historical order levels, right click context menu for subfile options and more.  During the second half of the webinar I’ll be presenting an overview of  Presto. You can register for the webinar here.

Categories: Presto Tags:

Ending IE6 Support in Presto

April 15th, 2010 No comments

The upcoming version of Presto, release 2.2, will be LAST version at which we intend to continue to support Internet Explorer version 6 (IE6). Versions later than 2.2 will no longer be tested for IE6.

The trade-offs that go hand in hand with continuing to support IE6 in sophisticated Web tools like Presto are well documented (see for example Google’s views on this, or the articles IE6 Must Die and 5 More Reasons why IE6 Must Die). By aspiring to support IE6 we will end up stifling other areas of progress in the tool.

If you have any questions or concerns about this, please let us know.

Categories: Presto Tags:

V7R1 Readiness for BCD Products

April 14th, 2010 No comments

The BCD Product Development team has run a series of tests of the following versions of our software at V7R1:

  • Catapult 7.6
  • Spool-Explorer 4.5
  • Exodus 5.1
  • WebSmart 8.2
  • Presto 2.2
  • ProGen 9.5
  • DBGen 2.5
  • Docu-Mint 6.5
  • File-Flash Plus 4.5
  • Nexus 3.6 and 4.0

No problems were encountered.

If you have any questions about this, please contact Technical Support.

Search terms: 7.1 V7 R1

Presto 2.0 with new Visual Screen Editor now available

March 16th, 2010 No comments

Presto 2.0 is now available for download. To learn more about this version, sign up now for Thursday’s Presto 2 webinar!

This is a major release with several important new features and many improvements to how Presto handles your pages out of the box. The most significant new features and enhancements are:

  • New visual designer to easily transform and enhance page elements.
  • New skins in a variety of looks & color schemes.
  • Added support for device names.
  • Support for using arrow keys on keyboard to simulate a 5250 session.
  • Support for messages displayed in the 5250 emulator status bar.
  • Implementation of of absolute positioned HTML for precise replication of screens and an improved out of the box experience.
  • Numerous improvements to improve window detection and handling.
  • Improvements to the install & upgrade, including the ability to install to any library and have a correctly configured APACHE instance created automatically.
  • Improved debug capabilities with more detailed error logging.

We also made many improvements to the communications framework, to make connections more robust and reliable.

Download and Install Instructions
To learn more about this release, and download the install files, visit the Presto Downloads area in www.mybcdsoftware.com.

If you don’t yet have a myBCDSoftware account, please request one from the login page. If when you log in, you don’t see the Presto option in the Downloads menu, email Technical Support and we will give you access.

Upgraders
If you plan to upgrade an existing environment from Presto 1.6 to Presto 2.0, please contact us for instructions.

If you have any questions about this release please call or email Technical Support.

Categories: Presto Tags: