TN3270E library for Ruby?

Ruby
1

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.

2

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

3

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.