Re: Looking for a browser and/or server for MVS

Denis DeLaRoca (CSP1DWD@mvs.oac.ucla.edu)
Thu, 26 Aug 93 02:04 PDT


> we are trying to get a browser and server for an MVS environment. We
> already installed and started a little server (NCSA's httpd) on unixut
> most of our data lives on an IBM mainframe running MVS, so we would e
> to get server code for that. Has somebody already done it ?.
> Regarding browsers we have Mosaic and lynx on unix and the CERN brow
> on VM. Any browsers for MVS around ?

There used to be an MVS version of the line-mode Browser and WWW lib
but had not kept up with updates and changes... I took that code and
made it work under MVS/TSO. It is available as part of my CSOCK
package at ftp.mic.ucla.edu:/pub/mvs/www. It is version 1.x though,
I have presently the line-mode browser v2.06 and the WWW lib v2.09a
but I haven't posted the code yet... the line-mode browser is useful
enough but a more sophisticated browser is needed, something like an
ISPF-based browser, I may be doing that sometime soon...

Also, Tim Gausslin of the US Geological Service has now ported the
FreeWAIS code to MVS, so in principle the WWW library could be made
to use WAIS natively (though the WWW module that interfaces to WWW
needs some updating to make it portable to MVS, ie., uses socket
descriptors as file handles which is not supported by our IBM C
compiler and TCPIP services).

I haven't ported the WWW server code to MVS, the most difficult part
about that would be dealing with "forking"... you have to use MVS
tasking and some of the special calls in TCPIP sockets to pass
connections to subtasks.

-- Denis