Xcentrisity Overview

Xcentrisity web enables COBOL applications

At the core of Xcentrisity is eXtensible Markup Language (XML). XML is the basis for much of today's Web technology and infrastructure, and essentially all of tomorrow's. Industry giants such as Microsoft® and IBM embrace XML as the foundation of their Web solutions. Their investment in XML, and that of many others, means that Micro Focus can focus on helping you solve specific problems of Web transformation, without having to worry about more general problems remaining unsolved.

As the first step to allow business application developers to easily adopt this new technology, Micro Focus has introduced XML Extensions for RM/COBOL®, a facility that allows RM/COBOL applications to interoperate freely and easily with other applications that use the XML standard. XML Extensions provide the ability to import and export XML documents to and from COBOL working storage in a natural and intuitive way to the COBOL programmer.

Building on the power of XML as the foundation of connectivity, Micro Focus has also introduced the Business Information Server (BIS), a COBOL-specific Web Application Server. Together with industry standard Web servers such as Microsoft IIS and Apache, BIS offers application developers a unique opportunity to build state-of-the-art browser-based Web Applications or SOAP-based Web Services comprising RM/COBOL programs and COBOL data files and databases.

With BIS, business application users can access data, access application functions and execute COBOL service programs on one or many Web Information Servers located anywhere in the world.

A sales person can check order status for customers during the day and enter new orders in the evening as they travel • Emergency room doctors can retrieve patient histories on primary care physician files in another state, and primary care physicians can review the status of insurance claims residing in another location • Bank customers can see account status, pay bills, transfer funds, and make investments, all from the comfort of their own homes • Taxpayers can access to public records from anywhere.

Business application developers using RM/COBOL with XML Extensions and BIS do not have to become experts in XML, HTTP, HTML, and Web Services to effectively and efficiently provide leading edge e-business functionality to their customers. Business rules are brought to the new environment of the Web, but left intact.

Business Information Server

The Xcentrisity Business Information Server (BIS) is a web server environment that manages application sessions and makes them available via any web browser or other web user agent that is granted access to the BIS server.  BIS offers application developers a real opportunity to build state-of-the-art Service Oriented Architecture (“SOA”) applications incorporating legacy business data and logic freely mixed with the latest web languages and tools.

With BIS, remote users can access data, perform application functions and execute service programs on one or multiple servers located anywhere in the world.  For example, a sales force can check order status for customers during the day and enter new orders in the evening as they travel.  Emergency room doctors can read patient histories on primary care physician files in another state and primary care physicians can see insurance claim’s status.  Bank customers can see account status, pay bills, transfer funds, and make investments, all from the comfort of their own homes.  Taxpayers can have access to public records from anywhere.  With BIS, any modern application architecture, function, and appearance is possible.

Liant BIS has two major components:   

• A Request Handler, a web server extension that integrates either with Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) or the widely-used Apache web server.
• The Service Engine, which executes COBOL code under the control of the Request Handler.

A service program is the COBOL code that is executed by the Service Engine, is application dependent, and not supplied directly by BIS.

XML Extensions

XML Extensions for RM/COBOL is Liant Software Corporation's facility that allows RM/COBOL applications to access eXtensible Markup Language (XML) documents. XML is the universal format for structured documents and data on the Web. Adding structure to documents facilitates searching, sorting, or any one of a variety of operations that can be performed on an electronic document.

XML Extensions has many capabilities. The major features support the ability to import and export XML documents to and from COBOL working storage. Specifically, XML Extensions allows data to be imported from an XML document by converting data elements (as necessary) and storing the results into a matching COBOL data structure. Similarly, data is exported from a COBOL data structure by converting the COBOL data elements (as necessary) and storing the results in an XML document.

Version 2 of XML Extensions for RM/COBOL runs on Microsoft Windows 32-bit operating systems and selected UNIX platforms. XML Extensions requires RM/COBOL version 8 or later.

Version 2 of XML Extensions for RM/COBOL contains the following enhancements:

• Support for UNIX. The XML Extensions is currently available for selected UNIX platforms, including AIX, HP-UX, Linux, SCO OpenServer, Sun Solaris, and UnixWare.
• Document Type Definition Support. Exporting of XML documents has been enhanced to include the ability to specify a document type definition, which defines the legal building blocks of an XML document. A DTD can be used to define entity names that are referred to by the values of FILLER data items in the COBOL data structure being exported.
• Anonymous COBOL Data Structures. The acts of exporting and importing of documents have been improved so that an anonymous COBOL data structure can be used. An anonymous COBOL data structure is any data area that is the same size or larger than the data structure indicated by the template file. This means that exporting from and importing to a Linkage Section data item, which is either based on an argument passed to a called program or a pointer set by the SET statement (for example, into allocated memory), is now possible. This same capability is also true for an external data item.
• Relaxed Time Stamp Checking. It is no longer necessary for the compilation time stamp in the object program to match the cobtoxml time stamp in the template file. That is, the program may be recompiled without running the cobtoxml utility. It is necessary to run cobtoxml only when the relevant data structure(s) are changed.
• UTF-8 Data Encoding. Support has been added to both the UNIX and Windows implementations of XML Extensions to allow the in-memory representation of element content to use UTF-8 encoding. UTF-8 is a format for representing Unicode. This may be useful for COBOL applications that wish to pass UTF-8 encoded data to other processes. XML documents are normally encoded using Unicode. XML Extensions for RM/COBOL always generates UTF-8 data.
• New XML Statement. A new XML statement, XML SET ENCODING, has been added to XML Extensions that allows the developer to switch between the local character encoding (which is system-dependent) and the UTF-8 encoding format.