BlueZone HostFront Overview

BlueZone HostFront enables you to expose your legacy IBM Mainframe (TN3270) and IBM iSeries (TN5250) applications as .NET classes or web services. Automatically wrap application screens and navigations in .NET classes and web services without coding!

What does HostFront do?

With BlueZone HostFront, organizations can turn their legacy IBM Mainframe and IBM iSeries applications into windows applications quickly and securely.

Alternatively, HostFront can be used to create web applications or web services that can be accessed via a web browser. Think of HostFront as an alternative to replacing your extensive investment in IBM applications.

HostFront is ideal for providing a high quality, easy to use web interface, to your customer community. IBM host systems are not particularly "user friendly". Many organizations are reluctant to provide their customers with direct access to their IBM Mainframe or iSeries hosts. With HostFront, you can provide your customers with access to data via a familiar easy to use web browser. Even if the desired data resides on multiple hosts, the data can be presented on one screen.

How does HostFront work?

HostFront runs an a Microsoft server and acts as a conduit between your IBM hosts and the end user’s workstations. HostFront provides your .NET developers with an easy-to-use development tool and secure runtime environment to create and deploy services from your legacy applications. Using HostFront, developers can expose business processes of legacy applications as Web services or .NET classes. The Web services are automatically generated without coding, and can be reused by new applications or by other applications or platforms.

HostFront is based on non-intrusive integration principles and interacts directly with legacy applications in order to take advantage of their proven logic, validations and security. Without starting from scratch, developers can integrate legacy applications quicker and shorten the time spent on integration projects.

What are Rich Clients?

HostFront is an ideal solution to allow integration of legacy assets into modern rich clients – custom desktop applications with connectivity to network resources. HostFront transforms green screen navigations into .NET classes, which can be embedded in the rich client or can be wrapped in web services to be accessed by rich clients on any platform. These navigations are built with a visual, drag-and-drop Visual Studio plugin interface and produced with no coding.

What are Web Clients?

HostFront also delivers green screen access to Web browsers either as HTML or an ActiveX control. The HTML delivery method is excellent for basic host access, while the ActiveX control provides the advanced functionality needed by power users. HostFront allows organizations to incrementally modernize host access by providing green screen access today and modern paths of access tomorrow.

What are Web Services?

HostFront plays an invaluable role in developing Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs). HostFront gives developers an easy-to-use development tool and secure runtime environment to create and deploy services from legacy applications. Using HostFront, developers can expose business processes of legacy applications as Web services or .NET classes. The Web services are automatically generated without coding, and can be reused by new applications or by other applications or platforms.