Cool. I'm going to head out for some serious pumpkin pie consumption
in a few minutes, but I'll get in touch, possibly also on IRC.   I
still hold out hope for some existing work in this area; there's a
rumor that someone I failed to meet at RubyConf does this sort of
thing at NASA, but I don't have any details.

Thanks,
--Wilson.

On 11/24/05, Obie Fernandez <obiefernandez / gmail.com> wrote:
> Wilson,
>
> I'm currently writing a book on enterprise ruby on rails for addison-wesley
> and your message definitely caught my eye because it's one of the topics I
> want to cover. I don't know of any software like you describe, but if you
> would like to discuss possible collaboration please let me know and we might
> be able to figure something out.
>
> Obie
>
> On 11/23/05, Wilson Bilkovich <wilsonb / gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Has anyone done anything with the 3270 protocol in Ruby?
> > I write a lot of code that needs connectivity to IBM mainframe hosts
> > via TN3270E.  At the moment, I do that by 'wiring up' a terminal
> > emulator and telling it to do things for me.
> > However, this means that I only get one instance per terminal session,
> > and because these things are graphical, I can't run it headless inside
> > a cron job, etc, etc.
> >
> > I now need something more industrial-strength that I can run many
> > concurrent copies of, etc, etc.  I'd like to build a Ruby framework
> > for the kinds of things I do with 3270, and slap it on top of a
> > library.
> >
> > For fellow mainframe geeks, imagine (totally contrived example,
> > probably not what it would look like):
> > host.screen do |s|
> >    s.put :text => "Hello World" :field => 'fieldname'
> >    s.transmit if scr.ready?
> > end
> >
> > Unfortunately, I can't find anything that implements 3270 other than
> > terminal emulators and other application-level stuff.  It would be
> > nice if there were some C library that could be wrapped as a Ruby
> > extension.
> >
> > Has anyone done anything like this, and just kept it around for
> > personal use?  I'd like to avoid reinventing the wheel, but if I'm the
> > only one with this need, I'll go ahead and start working on a library.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > --Wilson.
> >
> >
>
>