Calling a HTTP service from COBOL

[Richard J Maher]

Hello,

> I am not sure what "solution"

Sorry? I thought I made it quite clear when I asked for some sort of "hello world" example (or was it "time.asp"?) that was implemented the recommend VMS e-business solution for the task (which, by all accounts here, would appear to be cURL)

Several of you have talked-the-talk but it would be really helpful if someone could walk-the-walk on this one or step-up-to-the-plate or any other annoying cliche :-)

As far as the task of delivering a reasonable XHR$ library, I for one rate the problem as considerably more challenging than any of you here. Yes, anyone can connect to a port 80 and send a GET request down the line, but some sites have a penchant for standards and functionality such as HTTP 1.0 or 1.1, SSL, gZIP (for ridiculous amounts of XML and SOAP metadata) content-types and content-encoding and chunking, and http "streaming" ('cos http is a streaming pile of pooh :-)

Now I still say my guess that a Mark (or a Steven) could probably deliver a result in about 8 weeks is valid, but I don't think they'd come in much sooner.

I also think it would be less than optimal to attempt to port an OO utility without flattening out the methods into entry-points and the attributes into item-lists. (If I didn't make it clear before, I'm looking for a procedural solution for VMS procedural 3GL languages. One or two lines of that code are still kicking around!)

Again use Pascal or C as your languages if you find COBOL a stumbling-block. But as Hoff once again appears to be mis-understanding COBOL and item-lists (as was the case with the $audit_event crash) let me attach some code to illustrate how easily COBOL works with item-lists. Perhaps it was the difficulties with C or Basic that he had in mind?

ASTs to catch the state-changes and item-lists to map the XML - sounds reasonable to me. SOAP and Ajax in one RTL!

Regards Richard Maher

PS. I wonder why Java has in built httpRequest functionality if (lib)cURL is the way to go? Google deprecates their SOAP API years ago, and half the world is exposing their servers to Ajax-style access, and yet HP/VMS doesn't can't spare the one-tenth of the money they've already thrown away at gSOAP to create a simple RTL?

[Richard J Maher]

Closed due to lack of interest in VMS's ability to communicate with the outside world :-(

This is no longer a VMS requirement. Full steam ahead!

Regards Richard Maher

[Richard J Maher]

Hi,

I noted with interest the following article on openVMS.org: -
http://www.openvms.org/stories.php?story=08/09/27/6153249

Is Axis2 now the answer for me talking to my RESTful servers like Yahoo Weather from my VMS BASIC programs?

Is this why all that money on the SOAP Toolkit was lost so that Axis2 could be the all singing, all dancing, SOAP/REST gateway to the outside world?

Has anyone got an example of Axis2 being called from C or COBOL this is really exciting!

Regards Richard Maher

[Bojan Nemec]

Richard,

I have not tested the HP version of Axis2 but you must know that Axis2 has two branches:
Axis2/java and Axis2/c.
The first is written in Java and the second in C.

A quick look to the installation instructions of the HP version gives me indications that this is the Java version.

Calling Java from COBOL will be another layer of problems.

Bojan