Communication between PC and mainframe via TCP/IP using APL
Nils Kolster, Christian Nagel · ACM SIGAPL APL Quote Quad · 2000
There is a growing demand to be able to process data, maintained within large mainframe databases, using Windows based workstations, thus making communication between workstation and mainframe necessary. The availability of the APL language on both platforms simplifies this problem tremendously, and offers the potential to use almost identical code on both systems. The workspaces (for APL+WIN 3.0 and APL2 Mainframe) written by the authors, allow the user to run a stateless server on one platform, which can then process incoming requests from any platform using TCP/IP. (A host-to-host communication facility is not yet provided.) Several specific server commands let multiple users interact individually with the server, e.g. to combine GUI and mainframe data or to plot mainframe data directly using standard software products such as MS-EXCEL.