Hi All,

Any one know if the ZTerm CE (or what ever it was called) works with the latest Pocket PC's (Windows Mobile 6) etc. Its been a while since I installed it (did work a few versions ago). Jack/Ty do you know if Rods still sells/supports this?

First some old none related history:
We already have a customer running half dozen of these on some old hardware (about 4 years ago’ish) for stores good picking etc and they telnet to the Unix server (via WiFi) and use some bespoke mini Ashell/Madics screen the size of 8x40 instead of 24x80.

Now and to the point:
Another customer (who asks us this every other year hoping the method and price will get cheaper) would like their reps on their PDA to access certain customer/stock information in Madics while on the move? but not cost a silly amount of money to implement.

So we was looking back and do it the old historical way of a few small screen in Ashell and they can telnet via the ZTerm Pocket PC? (and VPN).

Unless, Pocket ATE is soon out?!,
or can anyone come up with some great new 2007/2008 technology ideas what would not take too long to write and implement. I did think of writing a PDA app in Visual Studios and connect over the web some how to Ashell, but cant see this being a short little project.

Any one doing anything like this?

I don't think Rod has done any further development of the CE/PPC version of ZTERM in some years, nor does he seem interested in further such development. And I don't know if the current version works on the very latest devices. (It does seem to run ok on Windows Mobile 5 though, which is the latest I've tried.)

One idea for satisfying your requirement, assuming you don't have more than a few screens/programs to deal with, would be to implement a web interface. That would eliminate all need for any bespoke programming or add-on applications on the PDA device. (Of course, it means you have to do some modification on the application/server side to support CGI, and you have to have a web service running on the service, but the steps needed for that are pretty straightforward. And not necessarily any more difficult than the server-side programming you would have had to do anyway in order to make the app usable at a small screen size.

You can design the screens in whatever web-page design tool you like, label the data fields with variable names, and save the HTML as a template for use with CGIUTL.

On the other hand, if you have a LOT of screens/programs to make available to the PDA, then probably it makes more sense to figure out a systematic strategy for converting existing screen drawing logic into HTML-generation logic. I won't pretend that that would be easy.

Thanks for the idea, I may well just look into the web interface idea, anyone have any small example of anything that will get me going?

any way, i'll try look into that next week, now, tonight, is not a good idea as its the Madics XMas Meal, and its possible i'll forget everthing my morning.

Have a fun weekend all.

Well, when you fall out of bed sometime tomorrow afternoon, after the all-night Madics' recreation of The Christmas Carol, with such a headache that you can think of anything except programming, you might want to search for "CGI" in the index of the A-Shell Development Guide, which should lead to the topic "A-Shell as a CGI Engine", which should be enough to get you started.

Say hi to the ghost of Christmas past for me...

Looks interesting, Thanks.

I'll say hi to Mr ghost of Christmas past for you..

Hi Steve,

As mentioned in another post, we developed a web interface that basically runs any of the internally used A-Shell programs.
On each program we want to make available on the web, we add a switch to send data via CGI that is very simple.
As for the forms to be used in the web interface, most of them are just a bunch of variables that will be loaded from A-Shell via CGI with data and HTML formating (this includes full Tables, for exampl), this to say that, my form design tool is notepad.

Feel free to ask for anything, and if you want, you can even can take a look into this website.

Have a nice Christmas Meal.

Thanks Jorge, I may well just take the offer up and take a look at your web site, and im sure some help and pointers on the way, but first, i'll have a play and see if I can get a few examples running.

The Xmas 8oz Aberdeenshire Ribeye steak (hung for 28 days) on Roquefort mash with a Bordelaise sauce was very nice, yummy, downside, the ghost of Christmas past never turned up, so never said Hello.

Have a fun weekend.

I know we are off topic now, but i'll ask here as its a simple question:

Ashell CGI etc work OK with IIS 5.1 under XP?

Only ask as im just getting “Execute Access Forbidden” and everything is now set to Execute scripts and executables in IIS, and I’ve mapped the csitst.bat in the mapping section.

Im sure is a setup error my end, but thought I'll ask.

PS. This is for testing only, I guess we will end up with somthing else for AIX/Linux.

I must admit I haven't tried it. My thinking is that CGI is a standard that sits above all the details of http server implementation. (Otherwise, I'm not sure how the internet could really work, although obviously the same could be said of HTML, where surely there are slight differences in implementation, exploited by certain unnamed providers to try to tie you to their servers.)

But in any case, the question can be answered outside of A-Shell. Just create a simple HTML form and a simple CGI script that echoes back the inputs, without ever calling A-Shell. If that works, then my guess is that A-Shell will work, since it will just be an extension of the script that works.

More likely, the issue is that Microsoft has made it difficult to enable CGI, since they prefer to discourage the use of cross-platform standards.

Perhaps I'll try to get out my IIS manual one of these hours or days...