Web Enabling Your HP 3000

Premier Technical Brief - OSCAR

Inside of each “legacy” application are the yearnings of discrete functions, borne to encapsulate

access to our data, under oath to secure its access from proposed and even unknown access

platforms (the Web being the current hype). Premier Software insists that what’s important is to

re-architect the legacy application such that requesting client applications can exist as Web

clients, non-HP e3000 application, other HP e3000 applications, and the future software appli-

ances that appear.

OSCAR uses a high performance, scalable, RPC middleware - instead of ODBC/Image driver

software, to wrap and encapsulate application business and data access logic. This approach is

strategic for a number of significant reasons:

1. The new MPE Server Objects provide remotely invocable transaction services to a compa-

nies distributed development team and access platforms.

2. The transaction services are published in the OSCAR catalog. A developers companion tool,

the catalog serves to provide the organization with a visual repository of service interfaces.

3. OSCAR provides utilities to use these MPE services directly from your WWW browser, as

well as a variety of utilities for testing.

These transaction services are accessible from simple Web Servers using scripting languages,

as well as from more complex Web solutions that involve the deployment of a Web Application

Server.

For example a company using Cold Fusion as the Application Server links calls to a standard

“C” language DLL that implements a series of RPC’s to the HP e3000. These RPC’s (built with

our middleware-generation product) represent a variety of “business functions” which were har-

vested from an existing COBOL/VPLUS/ IMAGE application. All the investment in the COBOL,

rules, and edits were preserved. This approach allowed our customer to leverage their IMAGE

database PLUS the code they’ve written and maintained for years.

The “C” language DLL is not handcrafted. OSCAR code-generates these DLL’s from an IDL-like

specification that expressed each HP e3000 transaction service as a function name with discreet

inputs and outputs. The scripting in Cold Fusion was simplicity itself.

The end result was an industry-strength e-biz solution which re-used an application that had

been strictly accessible from MPE sessions. Now, instead of hundreds of MPE logons, there is

one session serving hundreds of Internet users.

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Recent Publication(s)

http://www.interex.org/hpworldnews/hpw907/02mpe.html

http://www.hp.com/ibpprogs/csy/advisor/spring99/interop.html