integration of legacy app in client app

[Ruth Bergman]

Hi all,

I hope that your expertise and experience can help us solve an application
integration problem.

Description of the problem:
  
We have existing legacy (existing) applications running under Solaris 2.x.
We are writing new client apps under Windows and browsers.  We need to call
services provided by legacy apps from the new client apps.  Want to avoid
the CORBA/COM approaches if at all possible.  
  
Here is the scenario we are envisioning.  Browser-based HTML/JavaScript app
is used to submit a request which translates into a "function" call to a
remote legacy application written in C and having a fixed C function call
API.  The browser interacts with a Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Internet
Information Server COM application in the middle tier, which in turn
performs an RPC to the remote application.  The middle tier application
waits for the results and formats them into an HTML result set which is
then returned to the browser application in near real-time.
 
Question:
  
Can an XML-based interprocess communication solution help us with this
problem?  
  
Constraints:
We need a low overhead solution (seconds).  We expect the actual legacy
application performance to be the bottleneck.  Of course, we need reliable
service.  And last, but not least, we need to prototype this solution very
quickly before we commit to it.
 
Looking forward to your responses.  Thanks in advance.
Ruth.


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