A Representative Slice of What Mainframe Vendors Are Offering to Help You.
Once again a new wave of technology is sweeping over the IT landscape. Early on, the Internet and Intranet worlds seemed as if they were going to be dominated by new, up-and-coming software vendors. As in many technology waves of the past, those companies that created the software for our sometimes not-so-beloved legacy systems seemed as if they were going to be left behind in the new age of Net technology.
But five years into our new Net world, legacy vendors are fighting back and gaining substantial ground. Although strategies among them vary, companies such as IBM Corp. (Armonk, N.Y.) and Computer Associates International Inc. (Islandia, N.Y.) are being aggressive -- and often creative as well. To succeed in the Net market, legacy vendors have several things working in their favor. For starters, they bring to the table a guarantee of ease of design and compatibility of products. So far, the promise of plug-and-play has been viewed by skeptics as one of the great lies of the century. The last decade has shown that, even with standards, we do not always get compatibility. Furthermore, nobody wants to buy tools that need lots of work to integrate.
In addition, most large organizations still rely on legacy systems that are in place and will not be going away soon: Whatever Intranet technology is implemented must work with the legacy system to optimize its value. Those of us who went through the client/server decade have yet to forget how client/server technology failed to live up to its promises of lower costs, putting power in the hands of the user, and eventually replacing the legacy system.
Are Intranet tools from smaller companies worth looking at? Yes, of course, and in great detail. However, organizations with large legacy investments should not ignore what their legacy software vendors have to offer. In this article I have taken a representative slice of the industry to demonstrate how three vendors -- Computer Associates, Lotus Development Corp. (a subsidiary of IBM, Cambridge, Mass.), and Sybase Inc. (Emeryville, Calif.) -- address the issue of migrating mainframe systems to the Net.
CA-IDMS/ICE has several features that enable Internet/Intranet applications. The Spyglass Web server it provides manages requests by client programs for HTML applications. However, you can use any Web server with CGI support to build applications with CA-IDMS/ICE. A CGI program, ice.exe, parses HTML processing requests and passes SQL commands or report requests to process data. A report writer can be invoked to retrieve collections of information and generate HTML output to display query results. In addition, Enterprise Access for CA-IDMS manages the communications to the Web server platform, executes the SQL requests on CA-IDMS, and passes the results back to the ICE program running on the Web server. The CA-IDMS SQL option is used to process SQL requests against any CA-IDMS data. This can be combined with the CA-IDMS support for native VSAM files to enable VSAM data to be incorporated into Web-based applications.
The CA-IDMS/ICE package is directly integrated with CA-IDMS; you don't require any redundant definitions of data structures, nor do you need intervening hardware platforms to coordinate access to the mainframe data. Security administration follows the same rules as existing mainframe and client/server (ODBC) applications.
Looking forward, CA is working on Jasmine, an object DBMS and application development system geared to multimedia applications, including Intranets. Jasmine applications can execute as standalone systems or as Netscape browser plug-ins. In standalone operations Jasmine applications may be very suitable for kiosks. Web-based operation is optimized for limited bandwidth, with incremental access of multimedia data, intelligent caching, and compression for transmission. The execution environment is available on Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows NT, Macintosh, and Unix/Motif platforms.
Jasmine provides integral support for additional databases, including relational systems such as CA-OpenIngres, Oracle, Sybase, Informix, and Microsoft SQL Server, as well as mainframe databases including CA-IDMS, CA-Datacom, and IBM DB2. This gives users intelligent support for the complex data structures and large data volumes.
Jasmine is equipped with a multimedia authoring system with an extensive collection of multimedia classes, including image processing, advanced video, sound, algorithmically generated background music, and voice recognition. It supports methods in C, C++, and Java. The authoring system has intelligent editors to lay out scenes with objects, define properties and behavior, specify user interaction, and set up point-and-click integration with the database. In addition, an automatic HTML renderer provides text and form access to Jasmine objects, their links, and methods from a Web browser.
The mobile Intranet is a subset of a corporate Intranet. Sybase SQL Anywhere stores an Intranet in a database. It provides bidirectional replication for both Intranet (html, .gif, and related files) and DBMS content, enabling users to update content while disconnected from the corporate network. Remote users replicate pages they want to change onto their systems. When changes are made, the page is replicated back to the home server. This process enables work be accomplished at local speed, not modem speed. Sybase SQL Anywhere includes a personal Web server and NetImpact Dynamo, a development tool suite for building Web (especially Intranet) sites stored in SQL Anywhere databases. These Web sites can include both static and dynamic pages. Sybase SQL Anywhere runs on Windows 95, Windows NT, Windows 3.x, Novell Netware, OS/2, and DOS.
Lotus Notes includes a LotusScript Extension (LSX) that provides a link through IBM MQSeries to transaction-based systems, allowing the integration of business processes across Notes and transaction systems. The Lotus Script Extension Toolkit lets corporate developers and Lotus Business Partners extend Notes by creating new custom objects that can be accessed from LotusScript by adding their own functionality to the Notes client and server platforms.
An interface to legacy databases is provided through Data Object, which is a LotusScript Extension that lets Notes clients and servers access and update any ODBC-compatible RDBMS. In addition, Oracle LSX lets Notes clients and servers read and write Oracle databases and systems using Oracle's native SQL and Net protocols. To further facilitate the interaction between legacy systems and Notes, Lotus Notes Pump Release 2 provides scheduled, high-volume, server-based interchange, which lets developers and database administrators synchronize relational databases and Notes databases. The ODBC Driver for Notes lets you query and update Notes data from any ODBC-compliant database using familiar SQL commands.