BCD's latest release of its Web-enabling solution takes modernization to new heights. 

I guess it's a guy thing, but we just love tools. It doesn't matter whether it's a cool new circular saw or a great computer development tool—it's a tool, we can get a lot accomplished with it, and that's what counts. Guys are expected to get a lot accomplished in little time. It means we're powerful, more potent. Well, a cool tool just got better, and you'll love how much you can get accomplished with it.

Presto from BCD was introduced at the Nashville COMMON show two years ago as a Web-enabling tool that promised to render your green-screens as GUIs right out of the box. Many companies have used it to do just that, but with the recent release of Presto 2, the product today is highly accurate rendering screens and positioning fields while its enhanced visual designer gives developers broad creative latitude to the point where customizing screens is now fun.

BCD has been working heads-down for the past year on improving Presto, which the company sees as offering a tremendous opportunity in the System i sales channel given the modernization activity taking place today in the legacy marketplace. The original version of the product was well-received, but once users got their hands on it and tried it in the real world, new requirements came up, and BCD has worked hard to address them in the new release. From everything we have seen, the developers have made a great product even better.

Presto, and its successor Presto 2, basically are solutions to render green-screens as graphical screens in a browser. Presto takes the 5250 data stream from the older-style green-screen programs that few people today want to work with (dare I say none?) and makes data from the System i look like it's coming from a Windows application. There are different ways to do this, and the so-called "screen-scraping" techniques of yesteryear have evolved into what is now called "Web-enabling." Still, variations exist on how to make a 5250-style screen look—and work—like a Windows application.

BCD began with the position that whatever it was going to do, it was not going to slow down the system's processing capabilities just to make things look pretty. So Presto uses no 5250 online transaction processing but instead uses 100 percent batch processing. While there is some ongoing work the computer must do to retrieve customizations when a screen has been enhanced (either from employing the visual designer or tweaking the HTML code) screens are, for the most part, rendered on-the-fly, and users can expect similar response times to that of their green-screen programs.

In the first release, Presto interpreted the 5250 data stream and generated HTML based on complex pattern recognition. In some cases, the alignment was not identical to the original green screen, and developers could have to realign screen elements with the Presto Designer. In Presto 2, that has been fully addressed through the use of absolute positioning in the HTML, which results in screens being perfectly aligned. There also have been many improvements in window recognition. So the amount of manual intervention and screen creation has been minimized, if not eliminated altogether.

In both Presto and Presto 2, there is a unique identifier for each screen so at runtime it knows what screen you are displaying. Instead of forcing you to manually identify screens (as some products require), Presto creates a unique identification for each screen automatically. In the unlikely event that two customized screens appear so similar to each other that a unique screen cannot be created, there is still a way for the developer to easily specify the panel in question.

Eric Figura, BCD director of Sales, said, “The feedback we received from our customers confirms that we achieved the goals we wanted to achieve with Presto 2, and that was to render all screens as Web pages instantly without needing to make any customizations. In addition, we added a robust visual editor to this release of Presto; we made it possible for IBM i people to enhance their screens without needing to know HTML. The huge investment we made in the development of this new version of Presto is already paying off for our clients and BCD."

As Figura notes, Presto 2 now comes with a drag-and-drop visual editor—or designer—that allows companies to enhance screens to their heart's content. Out of the box, the solution takes about 30 minutes to install. Once installed, it will Web-enable all the green-screens on the system—in one minute! If and when you have the time to go back and add images and graphics on a screen, you have an easy way to do it with the newly upgraded visual designer.

While the designer is graphical, it also allows the developer access to the HTML code. You can add drop-down boxes, pop-up calendars, Google Maps, graphs, mouse navigation links, and a host of goodies—if you feel creative and have the time. If you don't, Presto ships with four new "skins" that have attractive, integrated style and color themes, including one that has a port-wine coloration that is quite striking. The others are attractive and conservatively suitable for a business environment, but all give you the "wow factor," as Marcel Sarrasin, the company's technical sales manager says.

However, if you don't care for any of the new skins (the original version came with three) or you just want to create a unique style, you can easily create your own global look and feel. The skins now have tone gradients and continue to give you the ability to format buttons, colors and more.

One Presto customer, Felicia Krubl, a programmer analyst with National Van Lines, summed up the benefits of Presto: “The amount of time and money it would take to accomplish what Presto is allowing us to do in-house, is hardly fathomable," she said. "Depending on how intricate you would like your screens to be.... Presto can either work for you straight out of the box, or allow you to manually accomplish just about anything you can dream up if you are willing to put a little more effort towards it. Either situation is an option with Presto. That's the beauty of it... flexibility.”

A feature in Presto 2 that is less exotic than the colorful new skins but is one that a number of users asked for is device name support. The setting for device naming conventions wasn't translated in the first version, but it is in Presto 2, and you can specify the device name as a parameter in the URL. The new release also has up- and down-arrow key support to match the way users navigate through many green screens versus the tab approach in a Windows application.

Presto comes with a preconfigured instance of the Apache Web server and is available to test-drive without obligation. BCD likes to talk about Presto in the context of its ClearPATH modernization suite that includes WebSmart ILE and WebSmart PHP, Clover Query, and Catapult. But it emphasizes the integration with Nexus Portal, its full-featured, optional, free portal software (free with paid maintenance) that can be used to provide a front-end to your Presto Web-enabled, and other, applications and dashboards. The portal provides a secure single point of access to enterprise information and includes a Web menu that gives the Presto applications a true Web navigation system.

If anyone has worked at one of a number of the country's major corporations, they may already have seen the results achieved from BCD's modernization tools, since the likes of Starbucks, GlaxoSmithKline, and Bridgestone Firestone rank among BCD's many notable clients. For these and other firms, adding Presto 2 to their existing toolkit of modernization wizardry can only bolster IT's ability to get the job done better and faster. BCD offers a free trial of Presto 2 at no obligation. However, it could be like test-driving a new car at the dealer; you may not want to drive home in your old clunker.

Chris Smith was the Senior News Editor at MC Press Online from 2007 to 2012 and was responsible for the news content on the company's Web site. Chris has been writing about the IBM midrange industry since 1992 when he signed on with Duke Communications as West Coast Editor of News 3X/400. With a bachelor's from the University of California at Berkeley, where he majored in English and minored in Journalism, and a master's in Journalism from the University of Colorado, Boulder, Chris later studied computer programming and AS/400 operations at Long Beach City College. An award-winning writer with two Maggie Awards, four business books, and a collection of poetry to his credit, Chris began his newspaper career as a reporter in northern California, later worked as night city editor for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, and went on to edit a national cable television trade magazine. He was Communications Manager for McDonnell Douglas Corp. in Long Beach, Calif., before it merged with Boeing, and oversaw implementation of the company's first IBM desktop publishing system there. An editor for MC Press Online since 2007, Chris has authored some 300 articles on a broad range of topics surrounding the IBM midrange platform that have appeared in the company's eight industry-leading newsletters. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Also Read

The Effects of COVID-19 on the IBM i Ecosystem

Dissecting the HelpSystems IBM i Marketplace Survey

IBM i Receives Package Manager Support