Creating an Interactive Program
- The Interactive System Productivity Facility (ISPF)
- The Display Management System for CMS (DMS/CMS).
A common way to create dialogs is using full-screen displays or panels. Although it is possible to create panels as data areas in programs and write them to the terminal one line at a time, this uses a lot of storage and is time-consuming. Also, the task of dialog management itself—that is, controlling the flow from one panel to the next—can be very complex. That is why it is better to use a standard data communications interface or dialog management system.
ISPF provides services that complement standard z/VM services and that implement interactive processing. The Display Management System for CMS (DMS/CMS) provides a way to implement interactive processing in z/VM. DMS/CMS lets you design panels that can be displayed from applications written in REXX, EXEC 2, CMS EXEC, COBOL, PL/I, RPG II, or assembler. DMS/CMS is a simple and fast panel generation tool used in application development. It may be used by any customer with VM application development requirements as an alternative to ISPF.