HostBridge Technology has announced HostBridge, a solution that allows enterprises to integrate their existing CICS transactions into scalable e-business applications.

HostBridge delivers output from an existing CICS/BMS transaction as an XML document containing order independent, name-value pairs rather than a fixed format, 3270 screen buffer. This eliminates the middle-tier application’s dependence on screen formats as well as the need to synchronize changes to the host and middle-tier applications. Because a 3270 data stream is never created, HostBridge is tolerant of changes in the location of fields on a 3270 screen that would cause screen-scraping solutions to fail. This is possible because HostBridge interacts with CICS applications through the 3270 Bridge interface, a standard feature of CICS Transaction Server 1.3. No modifications to CICS applications are required.

“As corporations continue making the transition to clicks-and-mortar enterprises they must provide employees, partners, and customers with better access to enterprise data via intranets, extranets, and the Internet,” stated Russ Teubner, founder of HostBridge Technology. “This requires a more robust, scalable, and cost-effective approach to legacy application and data integration. Industry standards like XML are key to e-business enablement, but what good is XML if one of the most common categories of e-business transactions can’t use it? By replacing terminal-oriented data streams with an XML document containing simple name/value pairs, HostBridge drastically reduces the complexity of integrating CICS data with e-business applications.”

HostBridge is compatible with any middle-tier application server that can send an HTTP request and receive an XML document. This includes IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic and SilverStream Application Server. HostBridge also compliments the broad range of evolving middleware technologies based upon XML, including Microsoft BizTalk and SilverStream xCommerce.