Analyst Report: Aberdeen |
 
Can a Web-to-Host Technology Be Slick - and Thin?
Web-to-host (W-to-H) may be perceived as a young market, as Web-enabling main-frames is not widespread. However, the practice of adding functionality and flexibility to these existing assets is as old as the data center itself, as decentralized computing has forced these proprietary architectures to embrace the desktop and now the Internet. Over the course of 25 years, protocol-specific terminals have evolved from hard-wired terminals to terminal emulators to thin multi-protocol emulators that also enable HTML publishing and data and business-logic integration. While these later solutions do move mainframe technologies into e-Business environments, they largely rely on screen scraping techniques - limiting high volume usage in production environments. Limitations of Screen Scraping Utilizing terminal emulation and screen scraping techniques "under the covers" yields solutions that are fragile and inherently rigid. That rigidity stems from the binding relationship - created and enforced by the Web-to-host solution - between data fields and their location and length on a particular screen. When the location or length of the data changes, the binding must be changed to reflect the change. As a result, changes in host applications or user requirements must be handled with great care and are often time consuming to implement. Furthermore, the processing requirements to support such techniques make them difficult to scale. The bottom line: e-Business environments must respond to change rapidly and cannot afford cumbersome solutions. Our mainframes are here to stay. According to IBM, Customer Information Control System (CICS) processes more than 30 billion transactions per day, representing a commercial value exceeding $1 trillion/week. Accordingly, organizations spent significant resources to ensure that their mainframes and applications were compliant in the new millennium. These factors, coupled with highly reliable and scalable environments and the significant amount of critical business logic and data that has been maintained on mainframes for decades, all attest to the good business sense of re-deploying these existing resources into e-Business applications. How Are Mainframes Being Extended? Today, most organizations use middle-tier application servers to handle W-to-H initiatives. Most of these server solutions come with legacy "connectors" that provide access to 3270 applications using terminal emulation and screen scraping. Though this arrangement provides a straightforward approach to legacy integration for the application server supplier, it is archaic for the customer to configure and maintain, and it presents performance problems as well. Furthermore, such solutions provide little or no ability to "XML-enable" legacy applications. XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is the essential portable data publishing standard in today's e-Business environments. With their many layers of processing, Web-to-host products based on terminal emula-tion and screen scraping are a complicated and ineffective foundation on which to XML-enable host applications. Russ Teubner, a seasoned veteran in the Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) market, has recently developed and introduced HostBridge, a patent-pending software solution that allows an existing CICS transaction to be securely invoked via an HTTP request. Moreover, it delivers its output as a standard XML document, not a 3270 screen. Built on features that IBM has recently added to CICS Transaction Server, HostBridge intercepts the flow of data into and out of CICS applications, before it is formatted for display on a 3270 terminal. By replacing the use of 3270 data streams with XML, HostBridge eliminates the need for terminal emulation and screen scraping at the middle-tier. It also provides an implementation-neutral XML pathway between CICS and virtually any middle-tier application server solution. Using HostBridge, CICS/BMS transactions can be invoked by any middle-tier application or server that supports HTTP and XML, including BEA's WebLogic, IBM's WebSphere, SilverStream's xCommerce, or WebMethods' B2B. HostBridge offers an elegant alternative to screen scraping solutions, and it's a precedent-setting solution for application server suppliers. Many application server suppliers have bundled their legacy extension components within their development environments, reflecting the commodity status of W-to-H solutions. As a result, they may have little motivation for moving beyond screen scraping solutions. However, HostBridge will appeal to IT customers who have experienced the limitations of screen scraping technologies and will certainly appeal to application server suppliers who are interested in a more strategic offering. - Darcy Fowkes
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