tn3270 emulator usage comaprison

[Jeffrey R. Broido]

Cross-posted to Hercules-390 and IBM-MAIN

Bruce,
I did, but it was some four years ago. At that time, I located quite a
number of shareware TN3270 clients (seven, I think) including TN3270 Plus and
Vista. At that time, none of these clients had many of the ancillary features I
considered essential in such a program. I had been using a rather expensive
commercial package, NetSoft Elite 2.1, and, despite its many problems at the time,
it was loaded with really nice features such as true full screen operation, the
ability to pull-down CUA menus with a mouse double-click, the ability to reassign
most keys, etc. I sent identical e-mails to all of the shareware vendors asking
about these and many other missing features and listing the problems I found with
all of the products, for they all had pretty severe problems at the time. I
received an immediate response from SDI and was ignored by the other six vendors,
including Tom Brennan, sorry to report. I expect this was an oversight, as his
company's reputation for support is about as good as it gets, but I wasn't aware
of this at the time and didn't follow-up.
In the meantime, SDI cheerfully implemented most of my suggestions
one-by-one and sent me a pretty constant stream of alpha- and beta versions to
test. The product was already very good to start with, and the result, in my
opinion, is spectacular.
I just downloaded and installed the latest version of Vista and have been
playing with all the options for a couple of hours. My observations are as
follows:

1) Vista's screen update performance is now in the same league as
Attachmate Extra! and SDI's TN3270 Plus, with a slight edge
still going to TN3270 Plus.

2) Vista's font support is nowhere near as good as that in SDI's
TN3270 Plus. For one thing, TN3270 Plus supports both TrueType
and bitmapped fonts while Vista does not support TrueType. In Vista's
help file, the claim is made that TrueType fonts are not supported "since
they usually result in difficult-to-read generated graphics." Despite
this disclaimer, TN3270 Plus has no trouble with TrueType in this regard.
For another thing, while TN3270 Plus will stretch fonts to fit the screen,
Vista does not, which means that if I use my preferred screen sizes
(Mod4-43x80 or custom-53x80) with my Windows resolution set to
1280x1024, Vista will not fill the screen, leaving a huge border.

3) Vista does not have a non-windowed mode, though such a mode is
referred to indirectly on one of the help pages. Vista does allow
suppression of the menu and button bars, but one is still left with a
large border and title bar. SDI's TN3270 Plus, by contrast, has an
easy to toggle Full-Screen mode which displays 3270 contents edge-
to-edge, top to bottom, and looks almost exactly like a real 3270
terminal.

4) Vista now DOES have a position-cursor-and-Enter option and this defaults
to mouse left button double-click. This was the first missing feature I
wrote
to Mr. Brennan about (along with the others) in 1998.

5) Vista has a nifty option which allows the user to set-up different taskbar
button icons for different sessions.

6) Like TN3270 Plus, Vista now has a paste continute option (very handy).

7) TN3270 Plus has more user interface options and, in general, its option
setting dialogs are more straightforward. This is not to imply that
Vista's options are difficult to set, for they are not. On a scale of 1
to 10, I'd give TN3270 Plus a score of about 9 and Vista a score of
about 7.5 in this regard.

8) Vista has quite a number of interesting and apparently unique options
regarding screen lock-ups (automatic Reset), smart selection of JCL,
overall color saturation control, fully definable messages and titles,
etc.

9) TN3270 Plus allows for 9 concurrent sessions while Vista apparently
allows for 5 concurrent sessions.

10) Both allow custom screen sizes up to 72x200.

11) Both support TN3270E. Neither apparently supports GDDM graphics.

12) Vista displays sessions in separate windows. TN3270 Plus displays
sessions in either separate windows or one at a time in a single
window.

There are more differences, to be sure, but none seem as significant as the above.
I would still give SDI's TN3270 Plus the edge by a pretty wide margin, but found
that Vista, as it stands today, is a respectable product and I would use it
happily if I didn't have SDI's TN3270 Plus. All in all, on a scale of 1 to 10, I
would give SDI's TN3270 Plus a 9 and Vista a 7. If either added support for GDDM
graphics, I would bump it up a point.

Regards,
Jeff "Bomber" Broido

Has anyone sat down and compared the SDI TN3270 Plus vs Tom Brennan's Vista from a usage perspective?

_____________________________________
Jeffrey R. Broido, Morristown, NJ USA
"No Statements Flagged in this Assembly"

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[Jeffrey R. Broido]

Tom,
First of all, thanks so much for responding. I can see that what
everyone's been saying all along is quite right: you are about as responsive as a
software outfit, however small, can get.
I will post an update to both lists (a copy of this note) correcting my
misstatements and misapprehensions. As for the e-mails, either I'm confused or it
simply never reached you back toward the end of 1998. I was working for Pershing
div. of DLJ at the time and my e-mail address was jbroido-l/kJKU/bHgBWk0Htik3J/***@public.gmane.org, so your
search for my last name should have turned-up something. The way I wrote the
feature query note was to list all of the features I had grown accustomed to in NS
Elite and ask if any of them were implemented and I'd missed them or if they could
be implemented if they hadn't been. Then, I listed all of the shareware clients
in my survey and listed what I thought of were deficiencies (only according to my
personal view, of course) of each. I sent this note at once to all vendors. I
sent it a second time to Mochasoft as I couldn't get their client at the time to
stay up under NT4 (no service packs) on my now-pitiful Pentium Pro 200 long enough
to do a real test. As I said in my note, the only reply I received was from SDI
in Bermuda.
I no longer work at Pershing and, though I kept all of my significant
e-mail, I don't have access to it any longer and my old boss informs me that it
was purged long ago. This is a shame, for I would have loved to confirm the list
of clients that I tested. I've repeated this story often, mostly because I was so
impressed with SDI's unusual non-defensive response. It is entirely possible that
Vista was NOT one of the seven clients surveyed and I'm just creating memories
retroactively based upon its subsequent prominence (my memory isn't perfect, of
course, but I am 100% positive regarding Mocha). If you had seen my e-mail, I
have no doubt that you would have responded at least as well as SDI, this
considering your gold-pressed-latinum reputation and your thoughtful response to
my recent posting. Also, the fact that you had the position-cursor-and-Enter
mouse double-click feature before I tested is significant, for I'd been using that
feature in NS Elite for months, running around and enabling it for all of my
SysProg peers, though I never found anyone who was as interested in pulling down
CUA menus in ISPF as I was. Generally, the response was, "that's nice, yawn."
The point is that since this was one of the first things I looked for, and I
assume that the default in those days as now was to associate the function with
mouse left double-click, since my (possibly faulty) recollection was that none of
the seven shareware clients had such a feature, that, indeed, Vista was not among
those tested. I guess we'll never know. If this is the case, I would like to
offer my most sincere and abject apology for tarring you with that same brush.
As for the number of sessions, I guess I just assumed that since you only
had ready-made toolbar buttons for five, you supported only five. I did a quick
search in your help file and didn't find the answer. I see, now, that it's on
your features page. Duh.
While I was going back-and-forth with SDI, I did find a G manual which
described all flavors of 3270 graphics (programmed symbols, vector and bitmapped).
SDI had no access to GDDM at the time, however, and felt it would be too difficult
to develop the feature with all theory and no debugging. This was never high on
my list, in any case, though it well might be for some users.
As for TrueType fonts, indeed, they look a whole lot better at 1024x768
than at 640x480, though well-designed bitmapped fonts will generally still look
slightly cleaner (and I do like the fonts you designed), especially at the smaller
sizes, assuming there is an appropriate size for the application at hand. Still,
if you get around to it, TrueType support would probably be very much appreciated,
especially if you stretch the dimensions when having the font rendered to make the
displayed characters fit the chosen window size.
True non-windowed full-screen support was and is a big issue for me,
though toggling this mode can be tricky depending upon design. For example, NS
Elite and SDI's TN3270 Plus both allow full-screen mode to be toggled by
right-clicking anywhere on the screen and selecting the appropriate option. The
latter also allows the toggle to be associated with any key or mouse combination;
I use Alt-left-click. The reference to full-screen in your help file is under
font options/border size and states, "When a Vista session is “Windowed” (i.e. not
full screen), a border of the specified size will appear around the screen text
area. You can use this simply as an area to keep the text characters from butting
right up against the edge of the window, or you can make the border a bit larger
and change its color to indicate which session you are in (great for that Y2K or
Disaster Recovery test machine)." From that I inferred that you had a
non-windowed mode like NS Elite and TN3270 Plus, but I could find no further
reference to it. It's probably just a matter of terminology.
Again, I'm sorry for all the confusion and the implied criticism. You
certainly don't deserve that!

Regards,
Jeff "Bomber" Broido

Hi Jeffrey,
Sorry if I never responded to your e-mail(s) - I checked my old files
and couldn't find your name - I guess it got lost somewhere. But I
can't imagine not responding to a note, although sometimes my responses
aren't what people want to see (i.e. can't fix the problem, doesn't
support SSL, where's HLLAPI, etc.)
Anyway, thanks for mentioning my program, even though it didn't win :)
You know what they say - "the only bad publicity is when they spell your
name wrong" <g>
Some responses are below if you are interested. I didn't want to
respond to the group because it would look a bit like I'm defending
against your opinion, which is not the case - I appreciate your notes.
Regards,
Tom

1) Vista's screen update performance is now in the same league as
Attachmate Extra! and SDI's TN3270 Plus, with a slight edge
still going to TN3270 Plus.

And both much quicker than java HOD, from what I read on ibm-main the
other day :)

2) Vista's font support is nowhere near as good as that in SDI's
TN3270 Plus. For one thing, TN3270 Plus supports both

My feelings about TrueTypes are probably from the days when my screen
size was 14" running 640x480. Nowadays TrueTypes don't look distorted
because they are made of so many pixels on a large screen. I need to
add that logic if I get time, and it would save me from having to make
those raster fonts (one pixel at a time, by the way - no fun at all).

3) Vista does not have a non-windowed mode, though such a mode

is

referred to indirectly on one of the help pages.

I don't know what I could have meant by this. Maybe I meant "full
screen" (maximized) mode, which is when a window fills the screen with
no border - except the title bar is still there.

4) Vista now DOES have a position-cursor-and-Enter option and this defaults
to mouse left button double-click. This was the first missing feature I
to Mr. Brennan about (along with the others) in 1998.

That one I don't remember, and I don't have an old e-mail on this. Are
you sure it was me? (no offense here). It's just that I had the
left-mouse-double-click do that function since I originally wrote the
code in 1997 - before anybody could download it (May 1998). Or maybe
you used a different name in the e-mails (I searched for broido and
found nothing).

6) Like TN3270 Plus, Vista now has a paste continute option (very handy).

When you say "now" it makes it sound like Vista lacked this function at
one time. But it was in the program before I had a web site, so I'm a
bit confused. I could be wrong - but I just tested an old 16bit version
compiled in June 1998, and the function is in that version.

9) TN3270 Plus allows for 9 concurrent sessions while Vista apparently
allows for 5 concurrent sessions.

That's odd too... since the beginning it has always allowed 26 sessions,
just because I named them A-Z. If you could only get 5 going, I'm
wondering if it was for some other reason (like the 6th abended or
something).

11) Both support TN3270E. Neither apparently supports GDDM graphics.

I never have been able to figure out GDDM... someone pointed me to a
book recently, but I haven't had time to look yet. All of the sudden my
2 kids are going to school and guess who has to help with the homework 3
hours a night :)

There are more differences, to be sure, but none seem as significant as the above.
I would still give SDI's TN3270 Plus the edge by a pretty wide margin, but found
that Vista, as it stands today, is a respectable product and I would use it
happily if I didn't have SDI's TN3270 Plus. All in all, on a scale of 1 to 10, I
would give SDI's TN3270 Plus a 9 and Vista a 7. If either added support for GDDM
graphics, I would bump it up a point.

Thanks! 7 is not bad for somebody who does z/OS for a living :) It was
nice of you to take the time to respond to Bruce's question. I like
seeing what people think of the program (good or bad).
Tom

_____________________________________
Jeffrey R. Broido, Morristown, NJ USA
"No Statements Flagged in this Assembly"

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[John Kalinich]

Post by Jeffrey R. Broido
8) Vista has quite a number of interesting and apparently unique options
regarding screen lock-ups (automatic Reset), smart selection of JCL,
overall color saturation control, fully definable messages and titles,
etc.

Another unique option is the screen "update notification after xx seconds". This is handy when response time becomes slower than normal (e.g. max down in a large dataset, foreground search of a large PDS, slow connect speed from home, SVC dump taken). Sort of a wake up call.

Post by Jeffrey R. Broido
9) TN3270 Plus allows for 9 concurrent sessions while Vista apparently
allows for 5 concurrent sessions.

Vista allows up to 26 multiple host sessions (labeled A through Z).

Regards,
John Kalinich
CSC-St. Louis, MO

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