As400 to CouchDB

Tiny Java utility for reading data from AS/400 database, convert it to JSON, and import it to CouchDB database.

It is NOT a generic tool. You will need to edit the code to use it.

I am sharing it because it was very hard for me to find working code and good documentation for this task.

With time I will improve it and add documentation for others to use.

Compiling

It is an Eclipse Java project, so the easiest way is to import it in Eclipse. Since it is also a Maven project, I also recommend installing m2e plugin.

You can build an executable jar package with Maven:

mvn package

But first you should manually install jt400 with something like:

mvn install:install-file \
     -Dfile=lib/jt400.jar \
     -DgroupId=it.nuccioservizi.jars \
     -DartifactId=jt400 \
     -Dversion=1 -Dpackaging=jar

I put a script in `bin/install-jt400_jar' for convenience. This is because public maven packages are quite old.

Running

You must create a local.properties file with your local settings (usernames, passwords, ...). Or pass them via command line.

Run it as a console Java application.

History

It all started by the need to build a CouchApp backed by some data available on a legacy as400 system.

Java was chosen for driver support. The open-source jt400 drivers are the best I have found to query an as400 DB. They deal perfectly with character encodings (as400 does not use UTF-8) and they work seamlessly on any platform.

Documentation was the real problem (how to make it work through an SSH tunnel?). So I have decided to share this code hoping it will be useful to others.