XML Tools Can Unlock Access To Legacy Data

JP MORGENTHAL
March 1, 1999

A recent examination of products that support repurposing of legacy data trapped behind 3270 and 5250 data streams revealed a noticeable shortcoming-none of these products supports translation to XML data formats. Granted, XML has only recently been introduced, but it seems that these groups are missing a great opportunity.

There are some good products that facilitate repurposing of legacy data. Computer Associates' OPAL, CST Inc.'s Jacada and Innovator, Planetworks' Interspace and Wall Data's Cyberprise Host all offer tools for moving data between legacy terminal environments and newly fashioned client applications. Indeed, most of these tools even support the new generation of client applications that further simplify accessing legacy applications over the Internet.

The vendors of these tools have a significant understanding of the format of the terminal data streams, as well as the screen format and configuration files used in the native environment. These vendors' tools leverage this information to generate new clients that are supported in Visual Basic, Java and Web browsers. In many cases, this meets the demands of customers who only wanted to move away from the proprietary terminal world to low-cost PCs.

However, the migration away from terminal environments is well under way, and these customers are slowly joining users that need to extend this information outside the enterprise, across the Internet and into the systems of their partners, suppliers and customers. Leveraging existing data and applications as terminal streams and converting them to and from XML seems like an excellent solution for moving ahead in the age of digital commerce without risking further opportunities because of Y2K concerns.

Of note, this does not preclude users from accessing their legacy data as XML data, but it does require these users to build the translations themselves. All the above products offer an interface through which users can access the transformed data buffer before it is delivered to the client. These interfaces will allow companies to utilize existing products to cull data from terminal-based applications and render them into XML, as well as update applications based upon returned XML-based messages. Users should realize that performing this on an application-by-application basis is time-consuming and possibly error prone. It is clearly a function that is best performed by the tools that support legacy data repurposing.

JP Morgenthal is president of NC.Focus, which provides strategic planning, analysis and consulting of application integration technologies. He can be reached at jp@ncfocus.com.