Usage

AcuXML was designed for data exchange, but it can be beneficial for other uses as well. Following are some possibilities:

• Business-to-business data exchange – You can use AcuXML to enable efficient business-to-business data exchange in wide-area networks and over the Internet. Business partners such as manufacturers and suppliers, hospitals and insurance companies, buyers and sellers can exchange vital business data through the common adoption of XML.

  
  
  

  In order for two parties to exchange documents, both parties need to explicitly agree on the meaning of tags and data within documents. For instance, in a procurement situation, both the buyer and seller must agree on what <STATUS> means in an invoice document.

• Application integration – If one of your goals is to merge data from multiple sources in order to integrate business processes, AcuXML can help. Converting your COBOL data to and from XML can enable it to be used throughout the enterprise, so long as the meaning of the data is expressly understood. Similarly, data from other enterprise applications can be read and processed by your COBOL program, if your enterprise chooses to use XML as the common transport mechanism. Application integration can replace the isolated stovepipe systems of the past.

  
  
  

• Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) – ERP software promises to save companies money by centralizing processing functions that would otherwise be redundant in an organization. Enterprises that use ERP packages can choose XML as the data format used by the centralized system. AcuXML can be used to integrate your COBOL program with the data.
• Internet deployment – By combining AcuXML with AcuServer®, your end users can access XML documents residing on remote servers, whether those servers are in a local-area network, wide-area network, or Internet configuration. If you want to display your COBOL-based XML documents on the Web or inside a user's browser, you may do this as well using stylesheets or RDF files. With additional development effort, you may even develop an XML front end to interface with your COBOL program across the Internet. Most commonly, XML is being used as the language of Web services. It provides a standard by which Web services written in any language can communicate.

These are just a few of the many possible uses of XML. The capabilities of the XML language are far-reaching. However you choose to use it, you can make your ACUCOBOL-GT programs ready to read, process, and output XML data.