Abstract: A presentation manager accepts standard commands or modified commands from legacy applications to provide text-based and graphic-based user interfaces. The presentation manager efficiently generates graphic-based displays for legacy applications by directly retrieving graphic definitions according to conventional host commands. The presentation manager provides standard host display protocol messaging for text-based clients (e.g., 3270 and 5250 terminals) and provides appropriate protocol messaging for other clients (e.g., graphical user interfaces and JAVA). Methods are provided for determining the protocol supported by a client.