For several years now SOA has been held up as the unifying force for modernizing legacy applications. Applications on the IBM i have had a large number of technologies and tools available to facilitate the adoption of SOA, whether it is as ILE service programs or the creation of web services. But for some CA 2E users these have been less than attractive because they sit outside of the 2E model repository and require new skills and techniques.
When the 2E development team finally came up with a solution for the definition and publishing of web services wholly within the 2E development environment, there was a hope that this could be the silver bullet we had been waiting for. In reality, a number of issues were left to the developer to solve. At Desynit we have been spending time identifying, understanding, and refining solutions these issues so that we can apply them to our customers' systems.
Over a series of articles we will be shining a light on the work which we have been doing over the last year to open up 2E systems using the web service support in CA 2E r8.5.
- Selecting and adopting SOA principles within 2E web services
- Supporting parameter arrays
- Message security with SSL
- Access control, sessions, users and passwords.
- Debugging a running web service
- Performance tuning the IBM i/5 IAS
- Writing clients to use the 2E service