Mark,
I agree that it SHOULDN'T be to difficult, based on the premise of XML
and the files being self-describing, etc. The problem we faced was
taking that self-describing format and being able to account for all the
different tags that could relate to a field named "First Name". We
could get tags <FNAME>, <fname>, <Fname>, <F-Name>, <FirstName>,
<firstname>, etc., and needed to set ground rules for translation.
Compound this with the fact that we had to account for hundreds of
different fields in multiple files and then translate the files out to
something that could be imported to the back-end HP3000 application and
that is where it became extremely cumbersome.
I feel that there are a number of companies out there that specialize in
XML formatting software at reasonable rates, so it doesn't pay to create
it yourself. That's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Jeff
-----Original Message-----
From: HP-3000 Systems Discussion [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Mark Landin
Sent: Tuesday, May 02, 2006 9:46 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [HP3000-L] HP3000 - "Hard to Die"
At the risk of contradicting Jeff, I would contend that XML shouldn't be
too
awful tough to handle.
XLM is just a file format, similar to HTML. You can open any XML file
in,
say, Notepad and pretty much figure out in just a few minutes. So, to
start
with, there is nothing "magical" about XML. The trick to XML is that the
file describes itself. Part of the XML document you are sending or
receiving
includes a schema of sorts. That's the powerful part of XML. XML-enabled
applications are able to read this schema and therefore understand the
rest
of the document!
I don't know about any specific packages for the 3000 that do XML data
interchange, but I know you certainly whip something up in Perl. Perl
runs
fine on the 3000s, talks to IMAGE easily, and also has many toolsets
that
remove a lot of the drudgery of XML. The bonus is that if the company
you
are dealing with has defined their XML formats (which I'm sure they
have),
someone even moderately skilled with Perl could probably hack together
what
you needed. Perhaps someone has even written Perl code to handle this
specific XML format for Windows applications. Since Perl runs on so many
platforms, Windows Perl code often runs on the 3000 with a minimum of
effort.
Of course, for this to work, you need to understand XML documents, *and*
know Perl. But it really shouldn't be that hard to find a contractor
with
those skills if you lack them in-house.
On 5/2/06, Eduardo Garcia <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> There's some companies that need the exchange of information with our
> HPe3000, and they are asking us to send/receive "XML" files for this
> transactions. I now that tools like Oracle, has this facility , but
have
> no idea about understanding this files from the HPe3000...does any one
> has tried this before??.
>
>
>
> Will appreciate any comment.
>
>
>
> LSCA Eduardo Garcia
>
> I.T. - Interceramic S.A.
>
>
>
>
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