Products
Here you will find all the products making up the Frankenstein-Limes infrastructure.
With FLAM you access the compressed and encrypted data.
With FLUC you can apply every conversion implemented in FLAM on original data.
FLIES manages encrypted and compressed data in the network.
FLCL is the main command line by which you call the programs (FLAM, FLUC, FLIES) in batch mode for unattended operation.
FLCC is the main user interface by which you run the programs (FLAM, FLUC, FLIES) interactively.
FKMS is a simple cryptographic infrastructure based on FLAM for customers that do not operate their own cryptographic infrastructure.
With CLE/P we have implemented our platform-crossing command line. We are posting both modules as an open source project.
Information concerning the transition from FLAM4 to FLAM5
A distinction must be made between components of FLAM version 4 (and older) on one hand and our new FL5 project (FLAM, FLUC, FLIES). After 25 years of continuously developing a HLAS source for mainframe systems (z/OS, z/VSE und BS2000) as well as a WINDOWS version and an ANSI-C source for the various UNIX derivatives, the time has come to bring about a profound consolidation and extension, and FLAM version 5 is the result. Some of the products and functionalities described on our homepage have become available only with the advent of FLAM5.
In order to ensure total downwards compatibility FL5 treats a FLAMFILE created with version 4 just like another original file format. If this sounds strange at first, it will make sense when you look at the new Universal Converter (FLUC) that allows doing any conversion supported by FLAM5 without creating a FLAM5 archive. Since it also accepts a FLAM4FILE as a data source or data sink, you can not only execute FLAM4 COMP and DECO in the usual manner, but also transform a FLAM4FILE compressed with VR8 and encrypted with a passphrase into ADC-compressed data with AES encryption using FKME, and all this without storing a plain data file on disk.
Since FLAM5 not only supports various I/O methods but also allows an unlimited amount of conversions and a choice of formattings in the same run, these new options are automatically also available to FLAM4. This includes character-set translations between various ASCII and EBCDIC codepages as well as all UNICODE variants (UCS-2/4 or UTF-8/16/32). It also includes transliterations, substitutions, casemapping and many more functions. It also supports compression formats GZIP, BZIP2, and XZ(LZMA) as well as various codecs (HEX, BASE64) and encryption methods (OpenPGP). For example, if a GZIP file transmitted to host in binary mode contains UTF-16LE-encoded text with delimiters, it can be transformed to EBCDIC-encoded VB records and stored as a FLAM4FILE or any other record-oriented dataset.
FLUC is by far more powerful than FLAM4, so the conventional FLAM4-command and parameter setting can be handled by the FLUC subprogram. No job chains, scripts, or applications need to be modified. At the same time, with the new command line (FLCL) users benefit from the new conversion options (CONV).
Currently, we ar developing the new functionalities while continuing maintenance for the 4 conventional projects until all FLAM4 interfaces can be mapped 1:1 to FLAM5 functions. Until then, the following 6 projects will be continued in parallel until the transition is completed:
FL4W - FLAM4 for Windows (utility)
FL4U - FLAM4 for UNIX (utility)
FL4HUTL - FLAM4 utility for HOST (z/OS,VSE,BS2000)
FL4HSUB - FLAM4 subsystem for z/OS
CLE/P
FL5
Once the consolidation is completed, only the last two items will remain. The FLAM4 utilities and subprograms will be replaced by FLUC of the FL5 project. The listed products remain unaffected by this internal consolid-ation. The distinction and its understanding is only relevant for the support, and for the issue tracking in particular.
FLAM customers will receive FLUC as part of our update service free of charge. All deliveries of FLAM version 5 will also include FLAM4 and the new FLCL. The transition from the old subprogram to FLUC will remain entierly transparent for the user.
FLAM5 made it necessary to specify a new archive format which has now been implemented as an entier file system. In addition to storing elements of any kind (regarding type, length, data, and attributes) it allows, as a standard function, searching in compressed and encrypted data (hashcode). By supporting additional element types beyond the classical record (Record API) FLAM5 will be able to read any data formats (XML and ASN-1 or EBICS, SEPA, TDA and SWIFT) and carry any conversion between these formats.
By a COMP operation in FLCL, any FLAM4FILE can be converted to a FLAM5FILE//CLUSTER/DATABASE without needing to temporarily store plain data on disk. This provides an easy and safe migration to the new FL archives. Such a migration, however, will never become mandatory since we are committed to continue supporting reading and writing of classical FLAMFILEs.
Therefore, the descriptions of the different products refer to FLAM5 and FLAM4, respectively, and the parts of the FL5 project still under development are marked accordingly.