Hi there people,

For starters, I've got absolutely no experience with Baan, so I hope you people are willing to help me out. The situation is as follows, within a few weeks we will have to build a solution for our client where our own J2EE application will have to communicatie with Baan, real-time. The main tasks will be:
- Fetching and possibly updating some personal data of customers (name, address, etc)
- Signaling the Baan system that a new product will be inbound for repair

The problem is, I can't seem to find a comprehensive list of possibilities Baan has to communicate with other software applications. I was hoping someone on this forum could help me out.

After some searching I found the following suggestions:
- iBaan OpenWorld with the Java connector which seems to be what we need, but I'm not 100% sure whether this can be used for _real-time_ communication.
- A direct link to the BaaN database via ODBC / JDBC, is this even possible?

Something like an XML web service would be perfect. Can anyone help me out here?

Thanks in advance,
Erik

Openworld can be used for this purpose. It can be pretty complicated, and you may need a Baan consultant to implement it, but that's what it's for. It is not advisable to use ODBC etc. for writing to Baan, but for queries it's ok.

If Openworld is too expensive (they keep promising parts of it Free, but not development still...?), there are 3rd party alternatives. My company, RMCis (www.rmcis.com), has such alternatives, so take my advice with that in mind. We have a product used just for XML File communication in Baan IV real time without Openworld, and we can help out on the Baan side of updating customers and your inbound procedure. We have many standard libraries available to go with the XML processes. Other companies, including FullScope, BridgeLogix, Nazdaq to an extent, all work in this area, and probably there are more solutions than you can count for what people have coded on their own.

Let me know if you want any info or a discussion, we have implemented OpenWorld and our own.

Hi there,

_realtime_ to my understanding implies immediate reaction.
This is definitly not what you need.
What you basically need is a daemon session running in Baan which handles notifications (for instance files created by your web server) and does the required updates/lookups in Baan's tables.
This may sound 'batchy', slow and oldfashioned, but can be used to process online transactions without any difference noticable to the user.
Some of our users here print packing slips and barcode labels in exactly this way.
I don't know about the communication layers of the products mentioned by Ibencic, but files can definitly be used, like he stated too.
The real problem should be security issues like DMZ-holes needed for the communication.

Feel free to contact me if futher questions arise
norbert.wimmerATSIGNono.de

hth

Norbert

Thank you both for your quick replies. So there seems to be a few possiblities we could use.

OpenWorld seems like the solution that can achieve what we want, but it also sounds complicated and expensive to implement it, especially for the relatively small amounts of communication we need with Baan. 3rd party alternatives sound like the better solution. I'll keep your company in mind Lisa, thanks.

As for your solution Norbert, this also sounds feasible. Realtime is actually what we do need, or at least very fast response times. The situation is as follows:
1. User enters serial number
2. Our app sends serial number to BaaN
3. BaaN replies with consumer data
4. User confirms and/or updates data
5. Our app sends this to BaaN

If such a daemon is fast this would be a good solution. Thanks again and also thanks for your offers. I'll keep them in mind when we proceed.

Hi evdkieft,

realtime processing is in fact needed very seldomly. What this term implies has to be achieved on OS level so that response times of certain processes never have to exceed a certain limit, but we are talking nanoseconds here.

As I already mentioned before, the solution described above has provided response times suitable for inhouse dialog transactions which cannot be distinguished from a 'direct connection' to Baan from the users point of view.

regards

Norbert

If I had this requirement the way I would probably do it is use direct database lookup to check the serial number to get the customer and then use a function server to update the customer data or depending on the speed needed for the update possibly have the application write the updates to a text file and have a custom session that reads the file and does the updates and set this session up as a job and set the desired update interval in the job

Real Time vs. Not - The big advantage of Real Time is not the availablity on the Baan side quickly, it's the error reporting back to the user on the Interface. If you are taking batch type of information, with no need to report errors back to the user, then Norwim's 'almost' real time is a good fit. Sometimes you want to just take the info from customers, and if there are errors, then Sales can call them directly or fix on the system. Probably many more projects are of this nature than people realize. But, if you need to simulate the entry in Baan, return Baan errors to the end user if there are data issues, then you need some type of real time processes, or very good error checking in your interface.

Sorry for not viewing the Miscellaneous-forum very often, therefore I just saw your questions.
Allthough your personal profile doesn't tell, referring to your name I guess you're from the Netherlands?
If your questions are still pending shoot me a mail and I'll tell you what the company I work for achieved in the past concerning communication with Infor ERP-products, real time and if required XML-based, using our in-house developped interface techniques.

Regards,
Erik

Hi,

Perhaps our WebXtension product could be of interest to you.
WebXtension, a powerful service-oriented architecture (SOA) based tool, which offers live access to BaaN via any number of integration methods, such as, point and click GUI's, scanning interfaces, RFID tags, web services, or via soap\xml. It is often used as a middleware to external packages. The integration method has been generating particular interest lately, since we achieve our integration without the use of the AFS or custom code, it's a very slick approach. It’s this approach which also gives us the ability to support BaaN IVc BaaN ERP and SSA ERP LN.
Should you like to know more feel free to contact me, it may be a good fit for you.


Thank-you
Steve