MERANT Micro Focus Net Express™

Distributed Computing

MERANT™

Issue 3b
May 2000

MERANT has made every effort to ensure that this manual is correct and accurate but reserves the right to make changes without notice at its sole discretion at any time.

The software described in this document is supplied under a license and may be used or copied only in accordance with the terms of such license, and in particular any warranty of fitness of MERANT software products for any particular purpose is expressly excluded and in no event will MERANT be liable for any consequential losses.

Micro Focus® is a registered trademark, and Form Designer™, MERANT™, Micro Focus COBOL™ and Net Express™ are trademarks of MERANT International Limited.

Microsoft®, Windows®, and Windows for Workgroups®, are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation.

Visual Basic™ and Windows NT™ are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation

IBM® is a registered trademark, and WebSphere#153; is a trademark, of International Business Machines Corporation.

UNIX® is a registered trademark of X/Open Company Limited.

Java™ is a trademark of Sun Microsystems Inc.

Copyright© 1987-2000 MERANT International Limited
All Rights Reserved.

Preface

This book explains the support provided within Net Express for distributed objects and describes how to use that support with Orbix (IONA's Object Request Broker), OLE Automation and Microsoft's Transaction Server.

Audience

This book is intended for COBOL programmers who need to access distributed objects using Java, OLE Automation or Microsoft's Transaction Server.

How to Use this Book

Part One provides an overview of the methods available for accessing distributed objects.

Part Two describes how to call COBOL programs from Java.

Part Three describes the Object COBOL domains which provide support for access to Java objects, and for Microsoft OLE automation.

Part Four describes transaction processing using Microsoft Transaction Server and IBM WebSphere.

Notation

The following type styles and conventions have been used in this User's Guide:

• Text that you type is shown like this:

  cat script_name | more

  The italic text denotes a variable that you type as part of the command.

• Text in command lines or code examples that is optional is shown in square brackets. In the following example, the expression can specify that the column_name is like the pattern_value, or is not like the pattern_value, depending on the absence or presence of the optional word NOT:

  column_name [NOT] LIKE pattern_value

• Sections or paragraphs that apply only to a particular model or operating system are identified by a bold italic heading immediately preceeding the paragraph it applies to. For example:

  UNIX
  This paragraph only applies on UNIX systems.