Tom

“The short answer is that a RPG program cannot call a JSP. You can construct a URL with parameters and parse the resulting HTML. I have done this recently in Java. In my case, the external application was designed to work this way. Usually this kind of solution is bad because it is similar to screen scraping. When the UI is changed, your application will break. My RPG is a little bit rusty so I?m not sure if there is an API for constructing URLs. Perhaps the IBM XML parser could be used to parse the HTML?

“Instead of a brittle HTML parsing solution and if your company can provide a Java resource, then perhaps you may wish to consider the following. A Java application can have different types of clients. The UI with its JSPs is one of them; your RPG application is another. An RPG program cannot directly invoke a Java class in a J2EE application. Instead you must go RPG -> Java ?> J2EE. The plain Java bit in the middle is deployed onto an AS/400. An example of this is the Business Delegate pattern (http://java.sun.com/blueprints/corej2eepatterns/Patterns/BusinessDelegate.html). All you need to do in your RPG application is call the Java methods as subprocedures.”

– Michelle Davidson, editor, Search400.com