CA tool can help integrate multiplatform data sets
If your agency needs to link dozens or even hundreds of diverse data sets residing on everything from old mainframes to PC servers, consider Jasmine ii.
By John McCormickSpecial to GCNIf your agency needs to link dozens or even hundreds of diverse data sets residing on everything from old mainframes to PC servers, consider Jasmine ii.Such work requires powerful, flexible middleware that allows operation across platforms and standards. For ease of administration, it's also desirable to be able to develop applications within the same environment.Jasmine ii'the ii stands for intelligent infrastructure'is a middleware development platform that Computer Associates International Inc. released last month. The software can tackle many of the problems facing users who are trying to pull data from multiple places and put it on the Web.It promises to be much more than a database management program. Jasmine ii 2.0 is an object-oriented development environment that provides database support, e-mail management and middleware services through a single interface. To get around the biggest middleware problem, that of choosing between competing standards, Jasmine ii 2.0 supports a mix of Common Object Request Broker Architecture, Component Object Model and Enterprise JavaBeans components. At the core of Jasmine are reusable objects based on the Jasmine object database. Objects are automatically linked to applications. To control the objects in an application using Jasmine, the objects must be identified as fitting one of the CA Jasmine Providers.Among the Providers that CA has created so far are ones for COM, CORBA, JavaBeans, the Microsoft Messaging Application Programming Interface, Microsoft Object Linking and Embedding, the Extensible Markup Language, the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, CA Neugents, as well as database management and enterprise resource planning systems.Computer Associates also sells integration kits for many major products. These can ease installation and integration efforts by allowing programmers to use familiar IBM Visual Age, Symantec Visual Cafe, Microsoft Visual Studio, CA Paradigm Plus and other development tools, as well as Java and C++.Applications developed in a Jasmine environment can take advantage of the platform's transaction management, security and other tools. So if you're trying to deal efficiently with a lot of data stowed on a lot of platforms, Jasmine ii can greatly simplify and speed your development efforts.
Jasmine provides database support, e-mail management and middleware services through one interface
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