Transaction Oriented Application Links

Dharma AppLink 5250 is a member of Dharma’s AppLink product family. These products allow e-Business applications to access information from existing packaged or custom legacy applications and leverage the business rules embedded within those applications.

Dharma AppLink 5250 provides a user-configurable logical view of AS/400 based applications. When used in conjunction with Dharma Integrator, Legacy or Relational Links, an application developer can work with a unified view of all the pertinent information in their environment. This provides unparalleled flexibility and utility for new e-Business initiatives. The product set provides an excellent base for fast changing e-Business environments because views created are easily updated, expanded or modified.

Leveraging Investments in Legacy Technology

Creating new e-Business solutions for established companies involves unifying existing business rules and information from many parts of the organization. The sources for these rules and information are the existing packaged, custom or legacy applications used to run companies.

Traditional methods of integrating applications require coding or interfacing at the applications unique API level. Since no two applications have the same API, specific programming expertise is required to accomplish the desired integration. As the number of applications to be integrated increases, so does the learning curve for application developers and the complexity of the integration task.

Dharma AppLink 5250 provides easy to use access to existing applications. The product is ready-to-run out of the box, eliminating the need for custom coding or specialized software package expertise to integrate legacy applications with e-Business solutions. Because Dharma AppLink 5250 uses industry standard interfaces, business information works seamlessly with Web development tools and application servers. Simply access and update through existing business transactions, leveraging the company’s investment in the business rules embedded within the current applications. This reduces complexity for developers, and allows for Internet speed deployment with e-Business initiatives.

How AppLink Works

Dharma AppLink 5250 receives requests from Dharma Integrator or directly from an e-Business Application and determines the information sources and transactions required to fulfill the request. At times, a number of transactions could be used to fulfill a particular request. Dharma Applink uses its extensive optimization techniques to choose the business transactions that best manage network traffic, application server load and application transaction processing.

Once the business transactions execute, the resultant information is rationalized. Any data type transformation, sorting, or filtering required on the data to satisfy the transaction request is done at this time.

The resultant information returns to Dharma Integrator or the e-Business application in a standardized format. The e-Business developer has no need to understand the underlying applications or database systems.