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My current project has a need to extract some information from legacy flat files that are sitting on an OpenVMS system. Initially we thought that these files were ISAM, but it turns out that they are native RMS files. These files are still being used by production applications and languages like FORTAN provide an easy way to open them up and understand the data. Java, however, is a different story.

After some googling on the Internet we came up with a handful of third party products. Some of them are potentially suitable and some aren't. However, regardless of this, what amazed me the most is how difficult finding potential solutions was in the first place! We tried searching for JDBC drivers, ODBC drivers, JCA adapters, JDO implementations, pre-built IO libraries, migration tools, FORTAN compilers for Windows (the target deployment platform) and probably more that I can't think of right now.

Another option we're looking at is parsing the files up using bespoke code. I wouldn't say this is easy, since we're having to deal with the file byte by byte, but it's certainly feasible, especially since we've discovered that it's possible to get hold of sequential versions of the flat files that contain only the records and not the indexes. I am surprised that there isn't more out there, but then again I guess there are always going to be implementation specific formats and semantics that can't easily be written in a way that suits everybody. That said, if you do know of any Java libraries that might be relevant, it'd be great to hear from you.