Integrating legacy systems with DBMS’ and outputting XML

Linking your Web applications to your legacy systems is so yesterday. On the other hand, integrating legacy systems with database management systems and outputting XML, now that’s hot and groovy.

And hot and groovy is exactly what XAware (see links below) offers with XA-Suite, an embeddable platform for data integration, data migration and Web services. The product of XA-Suite is that you can combine multiple data sources and create an XML interface to what can be presented as a single logical data source.

Where XA-Suite is really valuable is in its ability to conform to and translate between various Common Information Models (CIM) such as RIXML, MDDL, FIXML, FPML, XBRL, ACORD, X12, ebXML, xCRL, Bluefin-CIM as well as custom XML standards. This is where the company’s “XML Views” come in.

XML Views (also called “BizViews”) are essentially bi-directional templates that map one XML specification to another and XA-Suite aims to be a “universal XML integration platform for implementing industry standards (CIMs).”

XA-Suite consists of:

* XA-iServer, a J2EE and Windows data integration server (which is multi-threaded, clusterable, and offers high volume transaction processing capabilities).

* XA-Designer, a visual IDE for creating XML Views (available as a native Windows or Java application).

* XA-Adaptors to bridge to enterprise systems including ERP (SAP, PeopleSoft, JDEdwards, Oracle), CRM (Siebel), Mainframe (IDMS, VSAM, IMS, Screen-Scraping) and Transaction (CICS) RDBMS, and XML databases.

* XA-Connectors, which connect applications with XA-iServer (synchronous connectors are available for Windows including COM, HTTP, SOAP, ISAPI, CGI, C++; Java Connectors are available for EJB, Servlet, HTTP, SOAP, JMS, Java API; an asynchronous connector is also available for JMS – there’s even a custom connector SDK).

This is a hugely powerful product line and XAware is considered a market leader. XA-Suite is priced from $5,000 to $50,000 depending on processor and connectivity needs.