The World Wide Web presents a dilemma. For the past 20 years or so, progress in information technology (IT) has been a combination of evolutionary, superficial, and transitory steps. Then along came the Web. At first the Web was important because it provided a powerful way of linking and presenting information. Later, it began to be important as an online storefront for businesses. Now, however, it is rapidly becoming the platform for more and more traditional business application functions. As a consequence, the physical location of information resources is suddenly irrelevant. Tightly controlled and managed IT access points have become a liability. Universal and mobile access first became a possibility and is now a reality. Companies find that their legacy application systems are not just big, complicated and old, they are big, complicated, old and not Web aware. The vast business programming legacy is fast becoming a vast burden to overcome, with the alternative being obsolescence. Unfortunately, the burden can indeed be very difficult to overcome, because the functions performed by the legacy applications are big, complicated and old. Fortunately, there is a way out!

Transforming the legacy applications into Web Applications and Services is the ideal approach, and if the legacy is built with COBOL, it is a practical and affordable approach.

The WEB Opportunity

So what is driving this do or die migration to the platform known as the World Wide Web? At this moment, customer convenience is paramount. The consumer is expecting and, in many cases, demanding that functions performed in the past via traditional media (e.g., catalogs, telephone) and human intermediaries (e.g., human order takers, bank tellers) be available on line, from their homes, and from their workplaces. The future, however, holds a much more powerful set of inducements: a universal standard human interface, location-free computing, software and services on demand, and complete technological transparency for the server.

Finally, a familiar graphical human interface is available that is not tied to a particular hardware or software vendor's proprietary technology. Manageable client/server and its connectivity are provided in a vendor-neutral way. Most importantly, the technology used to implement business functions in a WWW environment can be completely invisible to the user of the business services and functions. This means that no longer is it necessary or even expected, that the end user of a business application deal with implementation details of the application itself. No concern for languages used in the application, no concern for specific databases used by the application, and no concern for long-term viability of the application code; this is promise of the Web as a platform. What does this mean to the COBOL IT shop?

• The considerable advantages of a COBOL legacy can be leveraged.
• The disadvantages of COBOL can be minimized or eliminated.
• Significant new business opportunities can be exploited.

Xcentrisity is focused on making these three things happen.

Making It Happen

At the core of Liant's Xcentrisity solution 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 Liant 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, Liant 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, Liant 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.