Interoperability Part 2

In further reference to my recent post ("Interoperability")...

Has anyone had experience of setting up a JDBC datasource on an AS400 (running Websphere) to allow connection to an Oracle database running outside of OneWorld. This is to allow linking to a foreign table for querying when running client-side business functions on the web server.
I know it is possible to do this link through ODBC on other platforms but on an AS400?

Thanks,

Ant.

This is in a different direction, but if your client doesn't have a Windows enterprise server, you could create a business function that called a program on your AS/400. That program would write the required query to a flat file and ftp it to a windows server. A file watcher program on that windows server could catch the file and read the SQL statement out of it, then run it against the Oracle database. Then, it would insert the results to an ODBC datasource pointing to a custom file on your AS/400. The original business function called from the AS/400 could poll the custom file until it found the SQL results. There are a lot of failure points and since there's no way that I know of for the AS/400 to directly communicate with a Windows server, there wouldn't be a lot of detailed error handling. There is a software package from Rumba called Rumba Web-To-Host that runs on a Windows server and serves up a session on an AS/400 through TCP/IP, but I don't know the details of how it works. Client Access communicates to an AS/400 without FTP, but both of those examples have the AS/400 being the host so they're not exactly what you need. I've never seen a package that allows the AS/400 to initiate a session with another platform, but I don't know much about AS/400s; except the devil had to have been in a really bad mood when he created the first one.