XML at the heart of Texas A&M student services

The College Station, Texas-based university, with about 45,000 students and hundreds of faculty and administrators, had existed for years with a cornucopia of diverse systems written for a variety of operating systems in many different programming languages. The applications run the gamut, facilitating everything from student registration and admissions to bill disbursement, housing, and scholarship-tracking.

But as the applications grew to meet the university's needs, the systems--housed in a variety of Oracle8i, Microsoft SQL Server, Software AG Adabas, and Sybase Adaptive Enterprise Server databases on servers scattered around the campus--had more and more difficulty communicating with each other.

This "duct tape and baling wire" method of software integration, as project manager Timothy Chester put it, simply wouldn't work any longer. A drastic change of technological direction would have to take place to enable the university not only to run more efficiently, but also to allow it to begin developing much-needed Web services.

"We have deployed every conceivable application or Web server currently available, and although the best-of-breed approach can increase flexibility within a decentralized organization like ours, the challenge was figuring out how these systems could efficiently exchange information with each other," says Chester, who specializes in distributed software applications for the university's Computing and Information Services division.

To find the right technology to solve the problem, Chester and his staff spent nearly three years studying the methods other large universities had employed, and evaluating their own technology options. In the end, it became clear that eXtensible Markup Language (XML) was the best choice, because it would allow them to develop and integrate disparate systems regardless of the platform, language, or application server used.

To facilitate the use of XML, the university deployed EntireX Broker, middleware from Software AG that acts as a gateway, allowing developers to work with code from a variety of sources. EntireX accepts XML and translates it for the legacy systems, and vice versa. The middleware also lets Texas A&M programmers reuse existing code to speed development time and reduce errors--all in a Web-based framework.

"It's basically a middleman," Chester explains. "If I'm writing a Web application using Visual Basic, all I have to do is generate an XML data stream and send it to EntireX Broker, which decodes the information and translates it into the proper format for the mainframe. Then the mainframe sends information back through EntireX Broker, which puts it back in the format I need and hands it back to me in XML."

To prove that XML and EntireX Broker provided the right combination of technology, Chester's team developed several pilot projects combining the two. The first pilot involved erecting a simple Web page where students could check the status of their admission applications--a significant time-saver for a university dealing with about 25,000 applicants per year. A second pilot involved the development of a gateway through which the university's 30,000 to 50,000 yearly prospective applicants could access information.

The pilot tests proved successful, so the team moved on to a true test of its ability to provide far-reaching Web services--the development of a Web-based class registration system that would allow students to check class availability and enroll for classes. To create the system, the team built many business objects for functions such as adding a class to a student's schedule, selecting the entire student's schedule to display on the screen, and more. Other Web-based applications include a system that allows students to enroll and eventually pay for new student conferences, and an application that allows people to request catalogs, campus maps, and applications.

One of the first systems the new software improved was the aging telephone-based TouchTone class registration system, which accessed student data held in an Adabas database on an IBM 7060-H70 mainframe. Because the phone-based system allowed only 120 students at a time to register for classes, students were frequently frustrated when the system became overloaded.

The team started by engaging a team of Cobol programmers to strip the presentation data out of the phone-based system and build a set of functions and subroutines that would support both Web and voice communications. The staff then wrote a Web interface to that system that uses XML. The system calls its functions through EntireX Broker using Cobol programs, similar to the method used with stored procedures on database servers, Chester explains. The new Web interface complements the old registration system, which remains intact.

Now that the system is operational, the Computing and Information Services division will move on to other Web services--something Chester says is fairly simple to do once the structure and business objects have been developed for the class registration system.

"In this project, we built lots of business objects," he says. "We'll be able to extend those objects to other systems. That's the kind of extendibility we're looking at."

Next up will be an application allowing students to view and, eventually, pay their bills online. Other future Web services include providing students access to their current schedules, possibly linked to students' e-mail accounts; and creating a system that will allow university administrators and dorm managers to access a students' schedule for a specific semester to ensure that they are registered for the correct number of classes.

Karen D. Schwartz is a free-lance writer specializing in business and technology. She is based in the Washington, D.C. area.