Monday, May 11, 2009

Best of Breed Mainframe Integration and SOA Tools

I came across this white paper recently which touched on a number of the confusing aspects about SOA 'terminology' for want of a better word. Statements like '...with the connectivity and accessibillity offered by an SOA offers a great deal of promise....' confuse the issue even more IMHO as implementing a SOA in itself does not help with connectivity, accessibility or integration. When I originally came across SOA, I would have agreed wholeheartedly with the above but as I have said in other postings, the term SOA has now become so abused that it needs to be clarified what is meant. To be fair in this document, as one gets deeper into it, it gets into the standards that are used that do provide the ability to discover and use services available on mainframe. At the end of the day, most mainframe shops are also likely to be running at least one other server platform such as Linux or one of the various flavours of UNIX available. It is clear that getting at resources on both the mainframe and other platforms in a standard way is a base requirement which will ensure an organization can get the key benefits of implementing an SOA with an improved ability to reuse resources. While there are a number of ways to do this, it generally requires different tools for different resources. For example, there is generally one tool to access databases with another to access business logic. It is sometimes also necessary to use different tools on different platforms leading to multiple different interfaces. The SOA Gateway has been designed to provide a single tool to get at data and business logic on any platform thus providing a single, standard way to access core assets on these different platforms.

Best regards,

John - SOA Tools

1 comment:

  1. Very good article clarifying some of the SOA terminology - thanks John

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