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[<Charles.Giguere@i...>] 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
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