BDN - Banner Developer Network

My name is Joe Bautista and I work in the IT department for a graduate school here in Pasadena that, for the past two decades, has relied on a VMS-based legacy system to interact with Banner through the execution of custom SQL scripts, SQL Loader scripts, and Userbase file manipulation scripts. Because our department has been concerned
with the viability of this system and the process that rely on it, I've taken it upon myself to discover a way to migrate most of these to a platform running on a Linux. The good news is that SQL hasn't changed much in the last twenty years; the bad news is that the menu system that allows access to these scripts (as well as the text manipulation scripts themselves) was built using a proprietary database and application development tool called Userbase.

The task at hand, then, was to design a new platform that could:

1. Use many of these tried and true SQL Plus and SQL Loader scripts with little or no modification to them
2. Create a new menu system based on another tool or platform
3. Find a way to allow users to manipulate text files using something other than Userbase
4. Empower non-IT managers to create and update their menus and scripts without IT involvement, or at least with as little intervention as is necessary

I decided to go with HTML as the menu platform of choice, since it's relative easy to learn as a scripting language and since it will probably be a while until it goes away or is modified to any considerable degree. Using Java stored procedures, and more specifically the Runtime class's exec() method, I connected the menu items that a staff person could click on in a web page with the underlying server-side scripts that would in turn be executed on the database server. Authentication is handled by Banner Self Service. And object access is controlled using the standard object maintenance forms that come with Internet Native Banner.

See "Running SQL Plus, SQL Loader, Awk, and Bash Scripts over the Web" for more details.