A new development suite helps deploy HP 3000s as hosts for enterprise-wide server objects, providing message services while eliminating the need for client-server middleware coding.

Premier Software’s Online Services Catalog and Application Repository (OSCAR) comes with tools to reorganize COBOL code into remotely useable services. This capability lets development teams reengineer 3000 applications to become “services.” These MPE Server Objects in OSCAR give the teams a way to add remotely invocable transaction services to in-house applications.

OSCAR also provides an alternative method of communicating between applications and IMAGE/SQL databases. Instead of using ODBC driver software, OSCAR employs scalable messaging middleware which wraps and encapsulates business and data access logic already in 3000 applications. Transaction services are published in an OSCAR catalog, which developers use as a visual repository of services interfaces. The catalog holds this metadata as a meta-server, providing API access to the catalog from other tools such as COOL:Gen from Sterling Software and Platinum Technology’s data modeler ERwin.

Premier says the software, which costs $35,000, helps deliver client-server’s often-elusive reuse benefit. By developing an MPE Application server, customers can manage code reuse and extend applications to other database technologies while preserving existing business logic in applications.

OSCAR’s messaging technology supports connectivity between HP 3000s, HP 9000s and Windows NT. Jon van den Berg of Premier Software said the core technology “is significant in that MPE applications can be engineered as servers or as clients.”

OSCAR code generates custom CGI/C++ programs — software that helps permit back-end MPE Services to be used immediately through the Web. C code generated by OSCAR wraps existing COBOL code, linking the COBOL to C server code. Customers are using the messaging abilities to create MPE servers that communicate with NT clients, van den Berg said.

Tools in the OSCAR suite let companies catalog, publish and track server APIs through an enterprise, as well as permitting administrators to monitor and manage client-server processes. Premier says five HP operations use its software, including HP’s Support Materials Organization (SMO). OSCAR wraps the SMO’s IMAGE databases with a business API. Business transactions are then are defined using ERwin and the OSCAR browsers. OSCAR generates middleware and source code, which SMO uses with its HP 3000 COBOL code to turn its systems into Business Objects. OSCAR’s Security Broker controls transaction use by correlating user credentials against the transaction services.

At Billing Concepts in San Antonio, Texas, HP 3000s are used to generate billing for the leading long-distance providers in the US. Director of Call Center Technology David Dobbins said OSCAR was working well in the company’s reengineering efforts.

Billing Concepts has a seven-year-old COBOL/VPlus application “that we are trying to separate out into a Win32-based desktop application that still talks to the HP 3000 database,” Dobbins said. “OSCAR forces you into doing your data definition up front, and then it generates the code stubs for communication from the client to the server, or from 3000 to 3000. One of the biggest pluses for us was the ability to do 3000 to 3000 communication.”

The company chose OSCAR when looking for a remote process communication engine, having evaluated Quest’s NetBase RPC services (because it’s a Shareplex site). DCE ruled itself out “because of the sheer size and complexity, and we had a fairly quick deadline on this.” With a September start date, the project had to be complete by January 1.

“We like OSCAR because it gave us a happy medium between NetBase and DCE. We have five 3000s, and we’re going to be using a lot of these services between machines.”

Dobbins said he found a lot of the benefits aren’t necessarily OSCAR-related, but make it easier to get into well-patched COBOL code and restructure some of it. “Instead of having one behemoth COBOL program that does everything, we’re getting to break out our application into smaller components that we can reuse for lots of applications,” he said.

Premier touts the product as a Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tool. But Dobbins said the way Billing Concepts sees it, OSCAR is a variant of CASE.

“It’s not CASE from the perspective of design and layout of databases, but ties back into programs that talk to each other,” he said. “It abstracts the database for you.”

Billing Concepts used Premier’s professional services to get its first project off the ground, but is also developing in-house expertise at the same time. With only a little background in C on the development team, the company is creating new “services” with OSCAR that are a mixture of COBOL and C. “We’re reusing some of the COBOL code and replacing some with C where convenient or necessary,” Dobbins said.

The product’s price tag is significant, although Premier says it has discount programs. Dobbins said selling the solution to his management was possible by emphasizing the savings of code reuse.

“The price tag is fairly steep,” he said. “Compared to committing a developer to building or maintaining communication services ourselves, it’s not as unreasonable as it sounds. The biggest benefit we’re going to get from it is the code reuse. It’s already made our maintenance headache a lot nicer.”