Both the IBM® WebFacing Tool and the HATS Toolkit offer ways to enable your core business applications for the Web. The IBM WebFacing Tool converts your original DDS source files, providing a Web-based user interface for your 5250 host application. The HATS Toolkit transforms 5250 data streams into HTML dynamically, which enables applications to be migrated to the Web without accessing or modifying the original DDS source code.
The interoperability features between HATS and WebFacing allows you to leverage the advantages of both WebFacing and HATS by combining applications with converted and unconverted DDS source. With this technology your applications can be quickly and easily modernized using WebFacing and HATS.
If you would like to take your applications even further you may want to iteratively add new Web applications to take advantage of the latest Web technologies. The WebFacing application bridge allows you to seamlessly interconnect new Web applications (written with EGL, for example) with existing WebFacing and/or HATS applications.
This allows WebFacing applications to transfer control and data to and from other Web applications such as EGL, giving you the ability to combine HATS, WebFacing and EGL applications into a single application. This goes beyond getting data from i5/OS® in a Web application using direct database access or by calling a batch program via a Web Service. It allows you to link your new Web application to interactive i5/OS WebFacing and HATS applications and share data.
For details about how to implement the WebFacing application bridge, see Tutorial - Creating an Application Bridge between WebFacing and an EGL application.