Praise to IBM for shipping the integrated web application server (IAS) when v6.1 of OS/400 came out. Not because it was anything new or groundbreaking, but because it was fitted as standard, was ready to run and came with the necessary scripts to publish ILE programs as a SOAP web service.
Praise too then our friends in the 2E development team at CA who saw the potential and incorporated the features into the 2E development environment for version 8.5 of the tool. Now we didn't have to think about choosing how to publish our services to the web and we didn't have the hassle of selecting and installing a server to run them.
Everything's alright then, no problems to solve? Well, not quite. There were still some things left for developers to have some fun with.
Desynit was given a project brief by one of our customers to produce a
new web portal which could be used by several thousand suppliers around the world. The requirements called for us to find a way to connect the
existing 2E application with the Salesforce cloud where the portal would be developed and deployed.
At the recent
worldwide developers conference in Chicago I gave a presentation describing the work which we had to do in order to develop and deploy the 2E parts of the application, you can view the slides of "
Taking 2E Into The Cloud" on the Desynit website.
In the next few blog posts I am going to describe in a little more detail the techniques we adopted to create the web services layer. Let us begin:
Part 1 - Applying SOA principles to 2E web services.
Part 2 - CA 2E Web Service Security
Part 3 - CA 2E Web Service WSDL *** NEW ***
More coding techniques to follow....Matthew Morris is a developer and director at Desynit. Desynit works with companies around the world, looking to improve the business benefits of their existing systems, with lower costs and less risk. If you are interested in knowing more about this topic, or have comments, contact the author via email matthew.morris@desynit.com