A Gateway for Host Connectivity

Due to the persistence of mainframe applications in most enterprises, modern desktops need to use terminal emulation software to communicate with these applications. With the e -commerce revolution, it has become essential for enterprises to provide web access to these legacy systems to extend their scope to a larger, nomadic population of users. It is unrealistic to rebuild and replace the mainframe infrastructure due to cost and time -to-market issues. Therefore, interfacing with them becomes a valuable option. Several web terminal emulators and screen scrapers have been studied, but they are limited in terms of scalability, functionality, security, and usability. In this paper a generic middleware is introduced that serves a s a gateway to integrate the e -business infrastructure and the mainframe systems seamlessly. The architecture, design, and implementation of the gateway are discussed.