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MAKING DUMB TERMINALS SMART Several vendors, including IBM, offer HTML gateways that give users of 3270 and 5250 terminals easy access to the Web and corporate intranets. The gateway converts 3270 or 5250 datastreams into hypertext transfer protocol to call up Internet or intranet hosts. SNA Integration With HTML and other Web protocol support, 3270 and 5250 users will be able to participate in the Java environment as well. In essence, Java makes dumb terminals smart. IBM estimates that more than 50% of its Systems Network Architecture (SNA) users will need Internet or intranet access. But with more than $20 trillion invested in SNA applications and about 40,000 SNA networks worldwide, users are not quite ready to throw away their SNA networks just yet. Equipping 3270 and 5250 terminals to handle HTML and Java allows users to choose between Web browsers or terminal emulators when accessing host data. Browsers are appropriate for accessing host programs and data over the corporate intranet. Web browsers give users a structured, graphical view of data that facilitates intuitive point-and-click navigation through large data bases. In many cases, terminal emulation offers faster response time for data retrieval than graphically-oriented Web browsers. For some applications, terminal emulators may be the preferred tools because familiar function keys provide a fast way to navigate files and initiate processes. Furthermore, certain types of legacy data are easier to import into desktop applications than Web-formatted data. With access to Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) and SNA networks, the huge investment in terminals and legacy applications can be extended while giving users access to the Web and Java-enabled applications. SUMMARY The early success of the C++ programming language owes a great deal to its ability to access legacy code written in C. Likewise, Java preserves much of C++ and offers a number of compelling benefits: it is portable, high-level, secure, and easy to master. Together these and other benefits of Java have the potential to free companies from the dependence of long applications development cycles and let them adapt to changing business needs faster. Once written, Java applications can be run unchanged on any operating system to which the Java interpreter has been ported. The code for an application written for Solaris-based SPARCstations, for example, can be copied to a Windows 95 Pentium workstation and will run with no recompilation. In contrast, programming in C with various cross-platform tools promises portability, but generally there is still some code to rework before the application can work on another platform. Java does have some shortcomings. IS departments that are planning to deploy critical production systems built with Java must weigh its benefits against its shortcomings. For example:
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