For more than the last year, I’ve been working with FreeHost3270 for 3270 terminal emulation / interoperability at work. It’s worked, but it hasn’t been pleasant. The threading model sucks. The implementation of 3270 is tightly coupled with their telnet implementation. The Swing component they provided before I came along was horrible. The rewrite I did isn’t very good, as it copied a -lot- of what they had done before, and I’m sick of being ham-strung by crippled code that I cannot maintain effectively. Especially when it’s got a wonky threading model and doesn’t fully support tn3270e. Yikes.

Frankly, I needed to learn the full stack, and I needed to be able to implement it. I needed a clean(er) start than FreeHost3270. Yes, writing a proper Telnet NVT and Terminal Emulator isn’t a -small- task, but… if it’s done properly I’m convinced it’s not too big, and it’s not too imposing.

So I cut the cord holding me to FreeHost3270, and in preparation for a new, major release of the project at work where we need a rock-solid TN3270 API and emulator (without race conditions!) I’ve started work on something new. I decided it was time to strike out on my own and start building a new, more robust solution.

The early AWT terminal, which will be scrapped for a Swing terminal.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 at 10:07 am and is filed under Core Dump, Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.