Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition - Jacada's New Development and Runtime Options

Organizations looking to use their OS/400 servers or other legacy hosts as a foundation for e-business projects have new tools at their disposal from Jacada. Earlier this month the software company shipped the latest release of its application integration toolset, Jacada Integrator 4.0, which features new deployment capabilities with Web application servers, via support for J2EE Connector Architecture (JCA), as well as a new Visual Modeling Tool and support for XPath, an SQL-like query language for XML documents.

Jacada Integrator is a code-generation tool that builds programs that link practically any client program to applications or databases residing on a number of hosts, including iSeries, mainframe, Unix, Unisys, DEC, and other widely used business computers. The software, based on a package that Jacada acquired from Propelis in 2001, builds on Jacada's expertise in terminal-emulation and screen-scraping tools to provide a programmatic interface to these hosts.

For OS/400 shops, Integrator's Host Screen Connector generates a modern interface (i.e. XML, Java, or .NET-based) to established 5250 emulation sessions on the back-end. For mainframe CICS and IMS systems, Integrator can do a little bit more, by capturing transactions directly, instead of navigating the host application and using the resulting data stream.

This capability to present a 5250 screen as an Enterprise JavaBean (EJB), a .NET-based Web service, or a Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) transaction has many potential uses. One of the most promising uses of this type of technology is the capability to assemble new composite applications from business processes executing on AS/400 or iSeries servers. Jacada, which claims 200 installations of Integrator, says it has sold 40 licenses of Integrator for Siebel integration projects, and claims it is also doing well connecting hosts to new PeopleSoft implementations.

With the release of Integrator 4.0, Jacada has added support for a relatively new technology that appears to be rapidly gaining wide industry support: JCA. The Java community developed JCA to provide a standardized method of sharing resources among Java-based Web application servers and third-party information systems. With Integrator 4.0, Jacada has implemented JCA-compliant resource adapters for its Host Screen Connector (which provides the 5250 support) and the Host Transaction Connector (which grabs the CICS or IMS transaction directly).

Support for JCA in Integrator 4.0 means Jacada can now move the Integrator execution environment to the Web application server, rather than Integrator's stand-alone server, allowing Integrator to piggy-back on top of J2EE-based Web application servers, such as IBM WebSphere, BEA Systems WebLogic, Oracle 9iAS, and JBoss Group's open-source Web application server, and take advantage of those platforms' fail-over and load-balancing capabilities.

Jacada sees JCA supplanting EJBs for integration with Java programs. "It's a cumbersome approach," says Jacada's vice president of product development, Oren Ezra, on using EJBs for integration. Ezra says that while the basic JCA 1.0 spec lacks some features, which has caused some vendors to add their own proprietary extensions (Jacada has not), support for the core JCA framework is strong. "JCA is getting promoted as the right way to connect" to legacy systems, Ezra says.

Integrator 4.0 also adds a new component to the mix called the Visual Data Modeler. This tool is designed to reduce manual coding by providing a point-and-click method for mapping inputs from the host into the core Integrator development tool, called MapMaker. In previous versions of Integrator, some manual coding may have been required if a company used its own XML document, and needed to generate data for fields that didn't exist in the host application. With the new Visual Data Modeler, XML Style Language Transformation (XSLT) processing has also been eliminated, which should allow the integration to execute much faster, and free resources on the user's server as well.

Integrator also now supports XPath, an industry standard for working with XML documents. XPath support in Integrator allows a user to query and transform the hierarchical data structures created within the development environment, which helps to unlock the full power of the data contained in complex data structures without having to write code, Jacada says.

XPath support is "extremely important," says Jacada director of product development, Mike Chandler. Support for XPath further helps users add functionality that's not available on the legacy system, and helps Jacada eliminate the need for custom coding in Integrator. "We're now in the 90 percent range of not needing custom code," he says.

In the future, Jacada--which is listed by analyst group Gartner as the market leader for programmatic interface solutions --will be fortifying its collection of Integrator connectors to link to an even broader array of legacy systems. "Today we can access legacy systems, ranging from 5250 to 3270, CICS, and IMS on the mainframe side. We also have a Web page connector," Ezra says. "Our vision is to be able to connect to any legacy systems, broadening the legacy definition to anything that works today."

Whereas most host systems that are 10 to 15 years old generally fit the bill for a "legacy" system, Jacada plans to extend that definition to include client/server applications built in the last five to 10 years, and even Web-based applications built since 2000. "None of [these] have been built with integration in mind," Ezra says. "We'll be providing a way to integrate with them, with non intrusive links, all within the single development environment."

Integrator 4.0 is available immediately. A starter kit, which includes the development and runtime components, as well as the Host Screen Connector and a license for five seats, costs $39,000. Additional connectors cost extra. For more information, go to www.jacada.com.