Serving it up

Isn't it about time that we got the mainframe to actually serve up something useful - you know, in a server kind of way.

Working in a support role, a common task involves checking the output of previous jobs via ISPF - and, more specifically SDSF. Well naturally, there's always a better way.

For a while now (must check when), z/OS has provided an FTP interface to the JES facilities. This allows for all sorts of goodness:

• being able to list jobs
• retrieving all output datasets for a job
• submitting jobs.

... all from the comfort of your FTP client!

What's that? You'd rather use SDSF than an FTP command line to inspect output. Of course you would. But what if you could craft a custom Java interface! Now we're talking. Say tuned for more details.

Monkey Matters

The Eclipse Monkey scripting stuff looks cool. The ability to easily wire-up your own (& others) DOMs will make for handy little apps. Wayne Beaton has a great example here.

I thought I'd give it a go - but hit a small hurdle when trying to access my own DOM. The notes on the Eclipse site give the syntax:

DOM: http://update-site/plugin-id

My problem was - I didn't have an update site: I was doing this all on a local PC.

As ever, the answer was in front of my nose - or rather, in the code ... A quick check of the monkey code reveals that the metadata is simply extracted using a regular expression. In this case, it's this:

DOM:\s*(\p{Graph}+)\/((\p{Alnum}|\.)+)

meaning, anything before the slash is considered the URL, anything after is the plugin-id. And reading a little more reveals that Monkey will try and see if your plugin is loaded first - before using the update-site.

It was then a simply matter of:

1. exporting the plugin containing my DOM.
   
2. then installing my plugin in my workspace (copy to plugin directory)
3. and then running the script!
   

I finally had access to my DOM !! plus, learnt a little of the Monkey internals on the way :-)

My First Post

Ok, I guess that everyone does one of these ...

fingers crossed X.