3270 Terminal Emulators
If you are looking for an IBM Mainframe 3270 terminal emulator, be sure to take a good look at the options provided by Flynet Viewer or Screensurfer. To include a 3270 terminal emulation window inside a standard web application presents many challenges which usually result in a compromise in the implementation.
The Flynet approach utilizes the latest AJAX DHTML techniques to ensure that user keystrokes are identical to those found in traditional desktop emulators (including keyboard buffering) and that any host writes to the screen are immediately reflected in the web browser. 3270 Terminal emulation in a Screensurfer environment uses a different technique to ensure the same thing. True 3270 terminal emulator web gateways such as Flynet and Screensurfer can both exploit and optimize CSS-based customization of the IBM Mainframe terminal's 3270 attributes.
In particular, the Flynet Viewer 3270 for ASP.NET solution has excellent 3270 terminal emulator features not found in any other 3270-to-HTML product, including Scalable fonts, definable hotspots, user-controllable keyboard mapping and full keyboard support for function keys and other special keys.
Also, both Flynet and Screensurfer support graceful integration of enhanced web pages with pass-through terminal emulator presentation.
Other approaches include ActiveX or Java applets embedded in the browser's HTML page. When a 3270 terminal emulator session is delivered. When enhanced, large, clumsy graphical user interface code modules must be downloaded for every enhanced 3270 screen which makes for stuttering and annoying delays. This doesn't even cover the low-level programming skills required to make a GUI user interface really work for a 3270 terminal emulator screen compared to an HTML user interface.
