Yes, I know this is truly insane. But that won't stop me <grin>. I can think of an "interesting" possible enhancement to ZFile. From what I can tell just from reading the doc, it appears that ZFile is likely written in C and uses the C I/O functions to read MVS datasets.
Now, won't it be "interesting" to have a port of ZFile which ran on some other platforms such as z/Linux or Linux/Intel or Mac OSX or <shudder> Windows. How? Well, by having an STC running on the file owning MVS system. On the other system, have an environment variable call, for instance, ZFILE which points to the MVS system. ZFile on the Linux system would connect to the STC on the MVS system, via TCPIP, which would allocate the file and do the I/O. Security would be an issue, of course, so the contents of the variable might specify the MVS userid and password. I envision something like:
export ZFILE='user:password@host:port'
if the "user:password@" is omitted, then the security used would be that of the started task itself.
Just a crazy idea.
--
John McKown
Crazy, insane idea about ZFile.
John,
It is an interesting idea. As you say, ZFile is currently a thin wrapper around the C library io routines - like fopen, fread, fwrite, etc. The challenge as I see it would be to get this to perform well, since you wouldn't want to have a network round trip for each call.
Something that you can do quite easily is to call "fromdsn" or "todsn" (from our Co:Z or Dataset Pipes products) from Java - using Runtime.exec(). You can use these to convert a dataset to a pipe stream for a remote Java program.
Kirk
It is an interesting idea. As you say, ZFile is currently a thin wrapper around the C library io routines - like fopen, fread, fwrite, etc. The challenge as I see it would be to get this to perform well, since you wouldn't want to have a network round trip for each call.
Something that you can do quite easily is to call "fromdsn" or "todsn" (from our Co:Z or Dataset Pipes products) from Java - using Runtime.exec(). You can use these to convert a dataset to a pipe stream for a remote Java program.
Kirk
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john.mckown
- Posts: 48
- Joined: Tue Jun 12, 2007 2:46 pm
the basis
What got me thinking on this was a new GUI interface that we are installing on our z/OS system. It runs under JZOS and Tomcat, using Derby for its data repository. As best as I can tell, it needs to read some z/OS files (created by the batch process) using ZFile. So, in order to spare my z/OS system from the ravages of Tomcat and Java, I thought it might be "interesting" if the Tomcat application could be hosted on a Linux system. If there existed a ZFile on Linux which could do "remote I/O" to the z/OS system, then the majority of the CPU could be offloaded from z/OS. This particular application only reads some legacy files.
Just some insanity on my part. [grin]
Just some insanity on my part. [grin]