Now Southampton, Hampshire-based transaction processing specialist Gresham Computing Plc has introduced software that enables mainframes to be used more easily as information providers for public Internet, or internal intranet services, using standard Web technology. Casablanca, described as an intelligent gateway between Web servers and mission-critical corporate applications, connects mainframe applications to a Unix-based Web server, providing access to them via a standard HyperText Mark-up Language browser. Initial versions due this month provide integration for ICL Plc’s VME and Digital Equipment Corp VMS systems, with an IBM Corp MVS version due by next quarter. Casablanca sits between Web browsers and the applications on the mainframe, interfacing between Mark- up Language input- output screens and the request response interface more typical of the mainframe. Applications consist of the Mark- up Language forms and output documents, Casablanca- enabled by the addition of a field invoking the Casablanca dialogue and mapped to definitions held in the Management Information Base of the enterprise server. At the Web server end, a Windows NT version is also under development and should be ready by the year-end. Gresham anticipates that three types of users will be interested in Casablanca. First, organizations providing browsers to their users for internal use; the classic intranet users. Second, those organizations that want to give other businesses access to their information over the public Internet. Here security is important, and Casablanca provides the facility for specifying the security service to be invoked at the start of every dialogue, be it Kerberos, Distributed Computing Environment security, or mainframe-based security systems already in place. And third, organisations that want to provide public access to real- time information services that cannot be downloaded onto a Web server – the company is planning to show a demonstration of an airline information system on its Web site shortly: try http://www.gresh.com. Gresham Computing plans further integration with Oracle, via stored procedures rather than SQL, and transaction processing monitors such as Tuxedo and Top End.
