The role of these servers is to accept and manage user connections made thru a 3270 terminal emulator and manage the resulting user session and related 3270 inputs and outputs until the end of the user session.

Functionally, this role resembles the one played by the Terminal Owning Region in a CICS MRO configuration.

These 3270 user session management tasks are managed by a couple of server types: ARTTCPL and ARTTCPH, where the final ‘L’ stands for listener and the final ‘H’ stands for handler.

• ARTTCPL — Performs the role of a listener server. ARTTCPL listens to a public address – the address to which users wanting to connect to this application with a 3270 emulator will connect – then for each incoming connection request, it transmits this connection to one of its handler processes.
• ARTTCPH — Each handler process manages multiple connections including terminal I/O, user authentication, and calling the requested transactions on behalf of the user.

It is the role of the ARTTCPL to launch and manage the requested number of handler processes (ARTTCPH).

Each time a user requests a transaction, ARTTCPH transmits (through tpconnect) this transaction request to the transaction server.

This functionality resembles that provided by T.O.R. in a CICS MRO configuration when it routes a transaction to an A.O.R (Application owning Region).