stand alone Appl getting interacted with the mainframe

[Anees Khan]

Tnxs in Advance!

A very sill question i guess but need a clear picture on this..

Q) when we have a web based application,through browser we get connected to the server and get the data from the data base with request and response kind of stuff?right my question is when we have stand alone application or a software installed in the machine,how does this software talks to the mainframe system and get the data?through what medium does the application get connected to the mainframe system... and get the data or response?

Plz explain with a simple example

[Ankur]

Its good that you seek to clarify your question...

Consider mainframes as one big system which is on a server side and has all the "intelligence", "database" etc and your terminal just a way to key in information to pass to that server and get the response back. Interaction between the two happens with different mainframes specific protocols. In case of web it happens with http protocol.

Regarding the medium...The installation of client includes with it all the necessary connection strings to server (mainframes)

[vivek_kaisth]

Usually customised drivers are written to extract data from the server side as incase of oracle db and web based clients.Mainframe are usually quite complex and are multi tier based application. The easiest way to understand the principle is - understanding "Client Server" principle as stated above.

Usually the information is exchanged in XML format .