As a Mainframe programmer I was Disappointed when I looked at the page. I was hoping this would be a web based Mainframe emulator possibly running public domain versions of OS/360.
I've toyed with the idea of setting up mainframes-as-a-service. I would probably just run the various Linux distributions running inside Hercules and abstract it away as cleanly as possible. You'd never get the performance or capacity, but you'd get a cheap, easy emulation for coding and small-scale testing. It's been a while since I had time for a side-project but I'd still love to work on this.
This isn't actually too far fetched. IBM has a product called Rational Developer and Test Environment for System z[0] which allows you to run z/OS or any other s390 architecture in their hypervisor. Think of it as an enterprise version of Hercules that runs the latest version mainframe software. (Hercules can but licensing prevents this.) You could then essentially build a real "mainframe-as-a-service" (as you said) by deploying a Linux VM that has RDT installed and configured. Mainframe developers can spin up their VMs for on-demand dev and QA enivornments.
I know, because I am the system programmer who set this up internally at my company.
You're right. They would never allow you to create a business out of offering mainframe-as-a-service. But internally, offering this service to your developers in a large enterprise is feasible.
A browser-based vt100 terminal -- how cool would that be?
I wonder if you could run X11 in a browser. You'd have to get around the fact that it couldn't accept client connections, but otherwise, it seems plausible.
You mean like Gate One (https://github.com/liftoff/GateOne)? Right now it's just an HTML5 terminal/SSH client but soon it will also do X11 (video demo):
It will basically do the same thing as Mainframe2 except it'll be open source and you'll be able to run it (the server) wherever you like. I've been working on the X11 support quite a lot over the past few weeks... Hopefully the public beta will be ready soon.
That's cool. I can't foresee too many issues in putting an X server in the browser. Except that if you left the page, all of the clients would get killed in a fairly rough fashion. Could you run a window manager?
I've toyed with the idea of setting up mainframes-as-a-service. I would probably just run the various Linux distributions running inside Hercules and abstract it away as cleanly as possible. You'd never get the performance or capacity, but you'd get a cheap, easy emulation for coding and small-scale testing. It's been a while since I had time for a side-project but I'd still love to work on this.