<<As we saw in the first part of this two-part article, companies are increasingly turning to Web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA) as a way to get mainframes to talk to the entire enterprise, which is built on newer technology and applications which mainframes typically can't run. So Web services are used to merge the intelligence and data from the mainframe with other enterprise applications, in a process called legacy-enablement. All that sounds clean, neat and simple, but of course it's not. There are plenty of problems with the process, as we'll see in this column.
Problems with Legacy Enablement The first potential problem with using Web services and SOAs for legacy enablement is a surprising one, according to Mike Oara, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer for Relativity Technologies -- it's finding exactly where a piece of functionality is even located on the mainframe. "Someone from the business side of the company may want to include a particular piece of functionality, or data from the mainframe, and so they ask that it be included in an application," he explains, setting up a typical scenario. "But often, it's not at all obvious where that functionality is; it's often buried. So the first problem someone will come across is finding where the functionality is, and then finding the connection point to it." Another common problem, he says, is that when a program is written to integrate with a mainframe, it executes, and essentially takes a path to nowhere -- it gets stuck sending a query and receiving the response. A potentially larger problem than both of those looms, though, he warns. The world of the mainframe and the world of Web services are separate ones, and in a way they have their own culture and languages -- and they certainly have very different expertise. So someone familiar with a mainframe may know all about COBOL, but he will have no idea how to use WSDL to expose information to a Web service, for example. And those who are familiar with Web services generally have no idea how to work with mainframes. Bridging the technology gap between the two can be exceedingly difficult. Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst with ZapThink, notes that there is another problem as well: What he calls the "granularity issue." "The people who built mainframes didn't intend to have the data accessed by non-mainframe apps," he says, "and sometimes the data on mainframes is only accessible in very big chunks. The problem is that with Web services you often need a very small piece of data, and there's no API for the mainframe to help you get it. That means you need some way to remediate between the two." In addition, he says, there are a variety of security issues, including different rules and procedures for logons on mainframes versus Web services.>> You can read this at: http://search390.techtarget.com/tip/1,289483,sid10_gci1120842,00.html?track=NL-170&ad=527271 Gervas ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Get Bzzzy! (real tools to help you find a job). Welcome to the Sweet Life. http://us.click.yahoo.com/A77XvD/vlQLAA/TtwFAA/NhFolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/service-orientated-architecture/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
