Making the Cloud, Microservices, and Enterprise IT work!

I sat with my client on a major service orientation project as IBM presented their updates to CICS.  My client is a few versions behind (could actually find no compelling reason to bother to upgrade) on their mainframe and wanted to review if IBM’s added capabilities would offer any abilities the project could utilize. IBM’s CICS support for web services is well known by now.  Their CICS updates keep the web service support up to the latest WSDL – SOAP – and WS-* standards.  If you need or want to expose COBOL programs as a web service (and this can be valuable to allow older applications to be partially utilized as transaction engines in their area of expertise) IBM’s keeping the capabilities in line. IBM has also continued to expand a large variety of internal CICS capabilities.  This was a major time warp for me as CICS command line functions, com areas and linkage sections, and various transaction batch and script coding abilities are so dated.  As an...

What is Mainframe SOA? For the purposes of this article, I'm referring to exposing web services from COBOL applications in a mainframe environment. (The specific mainframe environment I'll discuss in this article is CICS.) Today there's a variety of tools and native functions that allow expose of CICS transactions or COBOL subroutines (or full applications) as Web Services from the mainframe. In brief, here's what these tools and functions come to solve: - Formerly COBOL did not handle XML natively. - While CICS began to expose web server type functionality some years ago, it did not have any way to link a web request to a COBOL routine. About 3 years ago both of these problems were solved natively, in somewhat of a limited fashion: - Enterprise COBOL integrated XML processing functions into the base language capabilities. However, COBOL is still limited to creating internal data structures using the standard COBOL data blocks. This means it's poor at handling ...