Server Guide

Developing your OS/390 Native application on the workstation

The following steps describe how to develop and run an OS/390 Native Smalltalk application on the workstation.

Step 1: Starting Smalltalk

Ensure that the environment variable points to the proper resource association file. See Setting up the workstation to test OS/390 Native applications for more information.

Run abt from a workstation prompt to start Smalltalk. Note that you can also run OS/390 Native commands, from a workstation only, while you are running Smalltalk under either CICS or IMS.

Step 2: Creating files on the workstation

There are several ways you can create the files your application will access in the workstation test environment. You can write records to an empty file with data that mirrors the OS/390 data set, re-create the data set on the workstation, or download the data set to the workstation. You can create a parsed record structure that duplicates the OS/390 records and test your program against sample data, which is the easiest and least time-consuming method of setting up a workstation test case. Duplicating the data set on the workstation can be time-consuming, depending on the size of the data set. To access the exact same data on the workstation and on OS/390, you can download the data set to a file on the workstation. See Creating files for the workstation simulation system for more information.

Step 3: Interactively coding and testing your Smalltalk application

In Smalltalk, code your application. The Smalltalk classes prefixed with Srv enable you to access and modify files directly from your Smalltalk application. Your program can read from and write to VSAM files, PDS members, or sequential files. Ensure that the resource association file is properly specified before attempting to run your test cases.

Step 4: Testing the OS/390 Native application on the workstation

You can test your OS/390 Native applications in a simulated target environment in one of the following ways:

If you choose to test your OS/390 Native application interactively from Smalltalk, you can either select (swipe) the code and execute it, or you can execute the launch code for the application from the Transcript, a workspace, or a browser. If you choose to test your OS/390 Native application by packaging it first, you must package the image as a single module. See Packaging your application as a single module for the steps to package a single module.

Step 5: Running the packaged application on the workstation

To run your packaged OS/390 Native application on the workstation, run the image using the esvio command. For example, if you package your OS/390 Native application and specify a file name of mymvsapp, you would start Smalltalk with the following command from a workstation command prompt:

esvio -imymvsapp -lCON

The specification of -lCON will return the output of the application to the console. Refer to IBM Smalltalk User's Guide for a description of the other command line arguments you can use to run a packaged image. You can also pass parameters to the image. See Passing parameters to an OS/390 Native application.


[ Top of Page | Previous Page | Next Page | Table of Contents | Index ]