XML Toolkit for System i5 Due on June 23

Published: June 5, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The software engineers at IBM's software labs are putting the finishing touches on the next iteration of XML tools for the OS/400 platform, which is known as the XML Toolkit for System i5. The updated software will be released on June 23.

While IBM has plenty of WebSphere middleware to cope with Java applications and calls to and from Java applications to resources on the OS/400 platform, as well as hooks to process XML documents, sometimes iSeries and System i5 shops want to use XML to link their own applications or to those of their business partners without having to go through the whole WebSphere rigmarole.

That is what the XML Toolkit is all about. With Version 1.1, IBM is including XML4C C++ parser and the XML4PR parser procedural language parser. The toolkit also has the XSLT4C transformer, which reformats or reorganizes XML documents to other formats that can be consumed and interpreted by applications. The toolkit also includes an XML build tool called XML Scripting for System i5, which is based on a combination of C++ and Java code that is derived from the Apache Foundation's Ant V1.5.4 build tool. Ant is interesting in that it spans OS/400, Unix, Linux, and other platforms. The parsers are derived from other Apache projects, including Xerces-C and Xalan-C.

The XML Toolkit requires i5/OS V5R4 and runs only on System i5 hardware. This server restriction seems hard to believe, and if you want to run it on an older iSeries box that supports i5/OS, it seems hard to believe that IBM is not allowing this. The XML Toolkit goes by the IBM product number 5733-XT2 and costs $250.