Abstract

WRQ, Inc. commissioned The Tolly Group to evaluate two products – WRQ Reflection for the Web Version 4.5 and WRQ Reflection of IBM Version 9.0 in a competitive evaluation against a pair of IBM offerings, IBM WebSphere Host On-Demand Version 6.0 and IBM Personal Communications Version 5.5. Reflection for the Web is Web-to-host software that provides secure access to IBM mainframe, AS/400, UNIX, HP and OpenVMS applications from a Web browser. Reflection for IBM is software that provides 3270 and 5250 terminal and printer emulation for PCs connecting to IBM mainframe (S/390) and AS/400 host applications. Engineers subjected the WRQ and IBM products to a battery of tests that benchmarked the performance of Web-to-host “thin” clients and TN3270 “thick” clients. Tests of the thin-client products measured the “first-connect” times for downstream clients to access mainframe data via the Web. The thick-client tests measured TN3270 HLAPPI performance via TN3270 sessions and screen updates via TN3270.