Re: XML on OS/390

["Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@home.com>]

[<Charles.Giguere@inalco.com>]
We are looking at implementing the usage of XML in our systems and since
most of our legacy data and applications (written mostly in COBOL) are on
an OS/390 platform, we need to move data from it to an NT box (and
eventually to partners).

...
1. Create XML files directly from a COBOL application (it is simple and
easy, but it is difficult to ensure the validity of the XML generated
according to a DTD).
2. Use the XML4COBOL parser/generator product (from MAAS) (we don't know
if it complies with the W3C DOM specifications and if it is easy to use).
3. Install JAVA on the OS/390 to have access to the myriad of XML tools
available on this platform (we don't have any JAVA expertise, but it could
allow us to concentrate more on business logic than on the creation of XML
files).
4. Convert the data from the OS/390 to XML on the NT platform (we are
limiting the benefits of using XML, since we cannot send an XML file
directly from the OS/390 to our partners, we must convert them on NT box
before).

[Tom]
5.  Someone at IBM ported Python to the 390 a while ago, that might be
another route.

Otherwise, I'd say to go with java, because as I understand it, the java
port to OS390 does a thorough job of converting from the IBM character
encoding to (I suppose it's) unicode and also handles floating point
representations well.  Why reinvent that tricky stuff?

There was a flurry of excitement here a few months back about problems some
people were having with IBM newline characters because they were either
illegal or at least not whitespace in xml.  That seemd to be a real problem.

Cheers,

Tom P