Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

One of the new vendors exhibiting at the recent COMMON conference in Orlando, Florida, was Invenso, a Belgian software company that sells OS/400 and Windows .NET development tools. The company attended the show to demonstrate its new product, XB/400, a native OS/400 data exchange engine that the company touts as an easier-to-use alternative to IBM's DB2/400-to-XML parsing software, and to begin developing a U.S. reseller channel for the product.

Invenso created XB/400 because it saw a need for improvement in the way XML parsing was being handled on the OS/400 server. In particular, Invenso considered IBM's Apache Xerces parser difficult to use, especially its requirement that users know API programming. Invenso, which was founded by two Belgians with AS/400 experience dating back to 1988, foresaw a tool that would shield users from the complexity of the Xerces parser in creating XML-based applications for the OS/400 server that use DB2/400 data. The result was XB/400, a "data exchange engine" for V4R4 and later versions of OS/400.

XB/400 acts as a mediator between the DB2/400 database and XML, which is rapidly becoming the standard for data interchange among disparate systems (although XB/400 supports other data formats as well). The logic that powers XB/400's XML transformation comes from its very own script language, called XBScript. Invenso says that even nontechnical users can work with XBScript to write programs that pull DB2/400 data into XML or load XML data into DB2/400 tables.

Users can write XBScript programs in any standard XML editor. Once the scripts have been written, they're saved to the IFS and are imported to the XB/400 application. Each script can be executed as a batch or as an interactive process and can be called by CL, RPG, and COBOL programs. The scripts are not difficult to write, Invenso says, especially with the instruction manual and sample programs guiding them along the way.

Considering the possibilities of the XML language, there is a huge range of applications possible with XB/400, but Invenso is concentrating on the product's potential in creating two types of applications: specifically, Web and print applications. On the Web side, XB/400 can be combined with CGI programming techniques to deliver pure HTML to a Web browser or to deliver the XML together with an XSL style sheet, which greatly expands the viewing options available to users. On the print side, Invenso is hyped about XSL-FO, an XML language that renders data in a paginated (PDF or printer-native code) document.

Currently, XB/400 is being used by about 30 companies in Europe, says Invenso cofounder Rudy Vanhille. One of those companies is Promedia, the Belgian company that publishes the Golden Pages, which is similar to the Yellow Pages in the United States. Promedia is using XB/400 to streamline and automate entering contract information into the OS/400 server. Previously, the process required a sales representative to manually type each customer's contract information into the OS/400 application. Now the company has tied an XML document into the DB2/400 database, so there's only one view of the data, which reduces errors and lets representatives view contract data more quickly. Other Belgian companies using XB/400 are Cebeo, an electrical equipment wholesaler, Alken-Maes, a brewer, and Russell & Bromley, a clothing retailer, among others.

Vanhille, a former director of COMMON Europe, says the Orlando show was "a good first step" in establishing a presence in the United States. The company is looking for business partners--including resellers and independent software vendors--to develop a channel in the United States. A free trial download of XB/400 is available on the company's Web site. For more information, go to www.invenso.com.