System iNetwork

Techniques

February 4, 2007

Beyond JTOpen -- the iSeries Runtime API

Writing Java rich clients for the System i, or just plain Java application, you sometimes want more than what is available from the IBM Java toolbox. WDSc includes the iSeries Runtime APIs. I have found these useful in developing rich clients, particularly when the application needs the information about System i resources.

IBM Websphere Development Studio Client (WDSc) has a set of APIs tucked away that go beyond the Java Toolbox. The title of the javadoc overview page is iSeries Runtime API. This dates these java classes. The original Java toolbox classes incorporate "AS400" in the name of the classes. These APIs refer to the platform as "iSeries." I wonder how will future APIs refer to the platform ... Systemi ... System_i ... "System i?" Hmmm.

Anyway, I digress. This package of APIs can be used outside WDSc, at least as far as I have been able to tell. The README html of the communication package says:

"This package is designed to be standalone and not dependent on anything in the IDE or the systems packages. The idea is that this package constitutes the new AS/400 communication layer, leveraging only the AS/400 system APIs and commands executed via the AS/400 Toolbox for Java, which is the one single dependency of this package."

The author is decidedly old school.

The package has three parts:
- communications
- user interface
- utilities

The communication and utilities parts are in one jar file, iseriescomm.jar. The utilities are in iseriesut.jar.

The communication part is in three package
- com.ibm.etools.iseries.comm
- com.ibm.etools.iseries.comm.filters
- com.ibm.etools.iseries.comm.interfaces

The user interface is in the package
- com.ibm.etools.iseries.ui

The utilities is in the package
- com.ibm.etools.iseries.util

What is in these packages? Go look for yourself!

For WDSc versions 4.x or 5.x they in in this folder under the installation folder ...

install_folder/iseries/eclise/plugins/com.ibm.etools.iseries.toobox_version

For WDSc 6.x they in in this folder under the installation folder ...

install_folder/rwdi_shared/eclipse/plugins/com.ibm.etools.iseries.toolbox_version

For all releases the jar archives are in the runtime folder beneath this folder. The javadocs are in the file doc.zip file in this folder.

WDSc 4.x and 5.x default installation folder is
C:\WDSC

WDSc 6.x default installation folder is
C:\Program Files\IBM\Rational\SDP\6.0

If you ever need access to a System i resource that you can't quite get from jt400.jar try the iSeries Runtime APIs. For example, using jt400 you can get the names of database fields, their type and length. That is about it! With iseriescomm.jar you can get everything for the database which was defined in the DDS! Nice.

Questions or comments?

Posted by Bill Blalock on February 4, 2007 at 6:07 PM | Comments (1)