Organisations with considerable investment in CL4 applications, or strategic or legacy data in CL4 databases, can protect and leverage their investment with a number of relatively recent CL4 features.
Previously CL supported development for terminal based systems and allowed access only to CL4 databases. With the penetration of the Internet in modern applications, CL4 now provides the means to assist the development of new applications using popular languages, alongside existing CL4 applications and allowing important data to remain in existing CL4 databases.
This may be useful where CL4 application development skills are not readily available, or other programming languages are preferred. Given the proven performance and long-term reliability of the CL4 database, this scenario has considerable advantages over converting to a new and more expensive database.
Web-enable legacy applications
The CL4.2.24 release includes a number of features to help web-enable legacy applications, including:
- CGI access to operate behind an apache web server
- a SOAP server to allow development of web services
- Blowfish encryption for cutting edge security
- Foreign language support
- HTTPS encryption of the web services using apache and OpenSSL
- Soap package signing
- Large database support
Examples of CL4 web applications are available on request.
CLDBLib opens CL4 databases to application development in popular languages
CLDBLib now opens the CL4 database to application development in many of the languages used in the UNIX and Microsoft Windows environment. It provides an API to languages such as C, .NET, Java, Python, Perl, Ruby, PHP and Pascal.
Alongside existing CL4 applications, new applications especially those targeted for Internet delivery, can now be developed in current technologies. Using any of these languages, you can now share your CL4 data with any application and database with any other language and database of your choice.
Rather than taking a generic ODBC approach, it accesses the data in a CL4 database by using a native CL4 approach. CLDBLib provides a data management capability equivalent to the CL4 language in functionality, speed and security. This results in extremely fast retrieval and storage of data, and since the API provided to external language does not use pointers, it is extremely secure.
The product is scaleable and thread-safe, and supports deployments for large organisations as a web server or application server module. A key competitive adviantage is that it can be used in both scripted and object-oriented modes.