The World Wide Web has experienced phenomenal growth over the last few
years. Although, at ifs inception, Web technology was primarily used
to retrieve information stored in static documents, important current
uses of the Web include retrieval of dynamically changing information
and the conducting of business transactions. Such uses of the Web resu
lt in access to dynamically changing data on or through Web servers, u
sually stored in a database. Huge volumes of business data exist on ma
inframes and other mature platforms that cannot be moved to client/ser
ver or workstation-based platforms, due to cost or performance issues.
Providing Web access to these legacy data, therefore, is of great com
mercial interest to businesses. In this paper, we survey several solut
ions that have been developed to access existing business data through
the Web. We discuss the details of two solutions developed at IBM: DB
2(R) (DATABASE 2(TM)) World Wide Web Connection and Net.Data(TM). Each
of these is a pure middleware approach as opposed to approaches that
are integrated with either the Web server or the database management s
ystem, which accounts for their flexibility and power.