I used to work as a consultant for a state agency that dealt with private welfare agencies. From time to time, some bureaucrat would decide that in order to be really effective, some private agency needed access to the state’s databases. So one of my coworkers or I would travel to that agency and install Client Access/400 on its PC. Sometimes, traveling wasn’t bad, such as when we got to go to a relatively civilized part of the state—downtown Chicago, for example. At other times, however, it could be a real nightmare. On one memorable trip, I got an unexpected two-hour tour of gangland Chicago from a cabbie who didn’t speak English. I’m not sure who was more apprehensive, me in my three-piece suit sitting in the back of a cab rolling through burned-out neighborhoods or the totally lost cabbie who kept muttering in broken English, “Not good...not good.”
In any event, by visiting these private agencies, we got to meet a wide variety of folks. At one agency, which turned out to be two rooms in the front of someone’s family home, we were installing CA/400 on the PC when one of the workers asked us if we’d look at one of their broken PCs. When we inquired as to what the problem was, she replied, “It’s the drink holder.” You can guess what happened next. We walked into the other room, and sure enough, there was her PC with a broken CD-ROM drive tray lying next to it. Seems the “drink holder” worked fine for small and medium-sized drinks, but that Super Slurpee from 7-Eleven was more than it could take. We politely excused ourselves, walked outside, and burst out laughing.
That was really a clever use of a CD-ROM drive. Who says you have to use them only to load software? Actually, something like that starts you thinking about other uses for the CD-ROM. One, which you may not have thought of yet, is to use a CD-ROM to distribute your own homegrown AS/400 software. This is something that any shop can benefit from, as the ability to distribute your software on CDs is quickly becoming integral to maintaining a competitive edge. It’s time that we in the AS/400 world embrace this concept of using CDs and start taking advantage of the hardware that’s already a standard part of our systems.
IBM Drops the Ball
The only problem I have with doing this, at the moment, is the means IBM has provided for accomplishing it. Currently, the only “native” method of creating AS/400 software CDs for distribution is through the use of an IBM PRPQ called CD-ROM Production Package for OS/2, which, naturally, runs only on an OS/2-equipped machine. Now, don’t get me
wrong; I think that as far as operating systems go, OS/2, like CPM before it (which was what the old Commodore 64s used), has a firm place in the history of modern computing. I’m just not sure OS/2 should be hauled out and dusted off every time IBM develops a new PC application. Maybe we should all take up a collection and buy a copy of Windows 98 or NT and send it to the IBM developers. You know, just to let them know what else is available.
The mechanics of creating your CDs with this software are somewhat less than desirable, too. In order to use this product, you have to use a couple of OS/400 APIs, qlpHandleCdState and qlpGenCdPremasteringInfo, to save your software to QIC tape on the AS/400. After saving the data to tape, you must then pop the cartridge out of the AS/400 tape drive and plug it into a QIC tape drive on the OS/2 PC. Then, you use the OS/2 interface to run the Production Package software, which reads from the tape and writes the data to the CD. Oh yeah, that’s simple!
An Alternative
A better alternative is to use a product called CD-ROM Studio from Centerfield Technology, Inc. (www.bradenmark.com). This Windows 95/98/NT-based product lets you quickly and easily move your AS/400 data to tape. It supports all the standard Save and Restore commands, such as Save Library (SAVLIB) and Restore Object (RSTOBJ), and runs from the AS/400.
It works like this: You run a custom CL command on the AS/400 to save your data in the format expected by the PC—in this case, using the ISO 9660 standard. Next, run another custom CL command to FTP the data to your PC. Once it’s there, the CD-ROM Studio software on the PC transfers that data to a CD via a standard CD-ROM recordable drive available at any electronics retailer. If you want to streamline the process, embed all of the individual CL commands for saving and FTPing the data to the PC into a custom program and run everything as one process. You now have a CD ready to load into the client’s AS/400 CD-ROM drive for uploading.
Perhaps the best argument for choosing this product over IBM’s product is that the only thing you need that you probably don’t already have is the software itself and a recordable CD-ROM drive. No need to fight your way through loading and using OS/2 or having to learn some rather confusing APIs.
Make Mine a Large
Software distribution has come a long way since the days when we shipped boxes of punch cards to a remote site, and the use of CDs to distribute data has become the industry standard. If you’re not taking advantage of your AS/400’s capabilities, such as using the CD-ROM drive for software distribution, then you might as well order that large Slurpee from 7-Eleven. Your cup holder is waiting.
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