Working with the Zend 5250 Bridge

The Zend 5250 Bridge provides two different methods for Web-enabling your PHP applications:

Zend 5250 Emulator - Takes the back-end logic of your 5250 application and displays it in a browser format. This is achieved without any work from the developer.
Zend 5250 Bridge API - A set of API functions which allow you to use the input and output data in your 5250 application to construct a PHP application which allows complete flexibility and customization options.

Which Method Should you Choose?

The method you choose will depend on the amount of time you want to invest in the process, the programming knowledge and skills that you or your programmers possess, and the amount of extra customization and functionality that you would like to add to your application:

Zend 5250 Emulator

Use the Zend 5250 Emulator if you:

Need to give users browser access to your 5250 applications and want to invest a minimum amount of development time.
Want to reduce emulator application deployment costs (licences/time).
Want to make small cosmetic changes (colors etc.) to your screens.
Do not know PHP or JavaScript (though a basic knowledge of HTML/CSS is useful if you want to customize the 'look' of your screens.)
Want to test the capabilities of the Bridge.
Plan to frequently change your 5250 Display Files.

5250 Bridge API

Use the Zend 5250 Bridge API if you:

Want to make presentation-level changes as well as applying additional display logic
Want to apply complete display-side customization to all or individual screens.
Want to combine several screens into a new view.
Want to remove or filter out content/data for a subset of end-users (e.g. redundant fields).
Have a good knowledge of PHP/HTML/CSS/JavaScript (recommended).
Expect to continue significant development of your RPG 5250 applications and want to minimize Parallel Maintenance considerations.
Want to pipeline the data coming from the bridge for usage in other, non browser applications (Java, Web Services, others.)

For more information on working with the Zend 5250 Bridge see Zend 5250 Bridge Introduction.