The multitude of Web-services-enablement software generally falls into one of three distinct categories: The first, most common, and conceivably least risky gather mainframe data by navigating the same green screens the user would, either in real time or well in advance of the actual transaction. WRQ Inc.'s Verastream for zSeries adopts this approach. "We allow you to leave the logic alone, leave the data alone, simply get rid of those multiple or arcane text screens, and replace them with a coordinated, consolidated composite interface that's designed with specific users in mind," says Shaun Wolfe, WRQ's president and chief operating officer.
The second category utilizes an IBM API to communicate with a department of the mainframe that IBM calls the Commarea--a sort of common meeting ground where transactions are directed to the appropriate task. This second category creates a type of "wrapper" around classes of transactions, enabling programmers in modern languages such as Java, C++, or C#--or, in the case of Micro Focus International Ltd., a Cobol standard--to address these transactions in an object-oriented fashion. This lets new programs communicate directly with old logic by way of middle-tier middleware.
Perhaps the most radical entry in this second category, from a marketing standpoint, is Micro Focus' Web-services development tools for Cobol. Ian Archbell, Micro Focus' VP for product management, softens some of the shock: "It's not so much the fact that it's Cobol," he says. "It's the fact that you've spent years and years investing in those applications. Those applications have real value, but it's hard today to get that new value into new applications."
The focus in mainframe applications, Archbell says, has shifted into new areas such as customer-relationship management. "So how can you actually connect those mainframe applications into new applications, which are often written in new technology [such as] Java or WebSphere?"
The third category of Web-services-enablement software is the one that's generating the most attention, and even some controversy. CommerceQuest Inc.'s Traxion Business Process Management suite "Web-service-enables all CICS resources, and then further gives [customers] the opportunity to create composite services by assembling together these individual services, all from the mainframe and/or from other Web-services-enabled components elsewhere in the network," says Paul Roth, chief technology officer at CommerceQuest. The result is a business process that exposes itself from the mainframe as a Web service, bypassing middleware entirely.
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