Big-Hitting DB2/400 Web Performance
As the demand for Windows NT Web application software continues to heat up,
HiT Software Inc. (San Jose, Calif.) is adding fuel to the fire. In addition to expanding its OLEDB Server/400 to the DB2 Universal Database (UDB) for AS/400 market segment, the company has also announced Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) 3.0 support for its line of Windows and Java DB2 access middleware.
OLEDB Server/400, a Windows OLEDB (Object Linking and Embedding Database) solution designed to allow access to DB2/400 data, meets critical Windows NT Server Web application requirements such as intelligent connection management and multi-threaded support, according to Martin Smith, director of sales and marketing at HiT. The OLEDB Server/400 natively supports ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) V2.0 application environments such as Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS)/Active Server Pages (ASP) and SQL Server.
The payoff for such a connection, Smith maintains, is significant. "We believe that Web integration is a huge benefit for midrange servers," he says. "If they're developing Web applications on NT with IIS--which uses ASP--then our product is a nice fit. ASP uses ADO, which in turn uses OLEDB. We think that OLEDB Server/400 will provide a smaller footprint. Previously, Microsoft had provided a universal OLEDB wrapper that wasn't optimized for DB2/400 access. But our OLEDB driver is."
To date, developers accessing DB2/400 data have found it necessary to use OLEDB-to-ODBC bridges to make use of Web application development environments such as IIS/ASP. HiT OLEDB Server/400 is designed to alleviate this need so applications can benefit from the smaller footprints and shorter code path execution, yielding faster performance. An available Developer Edition demonstrates functionality via included ASP and Visual Basic applications and source code.
OLEDB Server/400's capability to access OS/400 natively provides midrange server users with performance advantages over other database access protocols. By directly supporting ADO V2.0 environments, OLEDB consumer applications see consistent object-oriented data access, more efficient data buffering and increased flexibility with data types. HiT OLEDB Server/400 supports all OS/400 versions after V3R7 and can be deployed independently of OS/400 PTFs.
HiT OLEDB Server/400 Developer Edition is also expected to cut Web application development time by providing developers with working ASP samples to query and retrieve DB2/400 data, update DB2/400 tables and integrate server applications. Included source code demonstrates connections using ADO recordsets, executing stored procedures, retrieving table data, inserting table data and displaying results via HTML.
HiT's SSL Server is designed to implement secure communications between DB2 servers and clients by authenticating the server and encrypting the communication session. Written in "pure Java," SSL Server can run on OS/400 or OS/390 to ensure end-to-end secure data flow.