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The software was first conceived as a means to give VPlus programs graphical interfaces, but it was ultimately released late last summer as a full featured thin client version of Minisoft’s MS 92 terminal emulator. HP 3000 managers who have pressed the product into early service report that Javelin is giving them a lower-administration, smaller-footprint link for HP 3000 users.

Duane Ruch, manager of business systems at San Diego-based Pulse Engineering, said he’s deploying Javelin at nine sites around the world, hosting it over the Internet. The software gives the company’s manufacturing operations access to the HP 3000 Series 969/220 and MANMAN, the application from the MK Group. Pulse acquired the magnetics division of Nortel recently, and Ruch said he faced a 90-day wait to get the Thailand and Malaysia operations onto Pulse’s frame relay network.

Pulse, a firm which makes telecomm components such as parts for networking cards, needed to connect newly acquired overseas operations. However, the new companies did have good Internet service provider links. This let Ruch employ Javelin as an alternative means to access the HP 3000, downloading the thin client from one of the company’s NT-based Web servers.

The Javelin applet is only 75K, provides all the functionality of the MS 92 emulator, and is in use on 15 desktops at Pulse, providing MANMAN’s OMAR functions. Ruch sees the solution as a good backup for the company’s network capabilities.

“Telecommunications being the way they are, occasionally lines drop,” he said. “We have Javelin deployed so if our WAN drops, we can still talk to customers.” MANMAN is so critical to the company that “on a scale of 1 to 10, it’s a 52 here,” Ruch said. “If our connectivity is down for more than two days, we start losing revenue.” Javelin is delivered over the company’s intranet, but it can be accessed via public Internet if necessary.

Employing a Java-based tool wasn’t as much of a consideration as getting the Internet connection for the 3000. “It didn’t matter to us what it was written in,” Ruch said of Javelin. “It allowed us to connect to the 3000 over the Internet.”

The software is also putting users in touch with an HP 3000 at City Bird Airlines, a Belgian air carrier with reservation operations in Maryland. European-based travel agents can book flights on the airline’s Series 918 running Open Skies’ reservation system. The agents connect using the Internet, downloading the Javelin application to provide terminal services on their PCs.

“Most agents in Europe are on Galileo and Apollo reservation systems,” said Fred Sanchez, director of IT. “This will let them book directly on our system.”

At MM II site HK Systems, the company has standardized on Netscape’s Communicator for e-mail, and wanted to integrate both mail and HP 3000 timecard access from a browser while in the field. Steve Boes, senior principal software engineer at the company that sells solutions for material handling and warehousing such as cranes, said he liked the concurrent licensing in Javelin.

“With our timecard issue, people may spend 10 minutes a week on the 3000,” Boes said, “and that was the only need they had to get into the 3000. It didn’t make a lot of sense to buy a $150 to $350 license for a 10-minute session once a week.” Boes said a site license for a fat client emulator didn’t fit “because we’d have to have so many licenses that it wouldn’t make any sense.”

Boes said that his version of Javelin doesn’t offer file transfer services, but customers point out that low-impact file transfer is available using either FTP services on the 3000 or through Samba/iX. Javelin requires a browser to operate on the client system, something that can press desktops into new memory. “We found some of the lower-end PCs, the 486s, had to have their memory boosted to 32Mb before it’s pretty efficient to use,” Boes added.

HK is deploying Javelin to interface with MM II, running a timecard application written in Speedware which passes information into the manufacturing system. Boes said he’s using a browser cookie to pass a variable into the login script, “so we can identify the user for the timecard and avoid a manual login.” The HK system is using Javelin to communicate between two facilities in Utah.