April 2006 Archives

Browser Lock-out in the 21st Century

By William Henry on April 18, 2006 3:04 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

There should be a rule:

If you're building an application that is going to use a browser as it's UI and it's going to be on the WWW then it MUST support all standard browser features only!

OR

If you are using proprietary extensions then you must be in control of the client platform. I.e. you can do this internally at your business where you are supplying all the computers to your employees and can therefore control the platform. However, in my opinion even this is unnecessary.

Why in the world would you put something on the WWW (or internal web) that has proprietary features built in? Limiting your customer base to only those using Internet Explorer on a Windows box is just plain silly!

And example. About a year and a half ago I was given a refund from Arsenal.com (my favorite sporting team's web site) because they switched to using Sky as their web site host provider and with that came the Windows only lock in. Can you imagine telling an existing customer and one of your sports fans that they can't be a premier member of your site simply because you've switched to proprietary features? Did they have to? Not at all this is the 21st Century! It worked fine the week before but then they just locked out anyone not using Internet Explorer on Windows. They may have changed this by now but they haven't informed me.

Browsers are now the universal UI delivery platform. Don't lock customers, partners, clients, fans out! Today there is really little excuse for doing this - with all the technology available to web developers today.

Can we end the browser madness?

SOA J2EE and z/OS Mainframe

By William Henry on April 5, 2006 10:25 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

IONA recently announced how Artix z/OS can extend BEA's WebLogic and Aqua Logic product offerings. I was fortunate enough to be part of the certification process for Artix z/OS on Aqua Logic Service Bus (ALSB) several weeks ago. I was impressed with both products.

I traveled to BEA's San Jose offices in California. The configuration was a z/OS mainframe running CICS and Artix z/OS in Dublin Ireland, ALSB running with WebLogic on a Linux machine in Waltham, Mass., and both the Artix z/OS Designer (tool) and the ALSB Console running on my Apple OS X Powerbook in San Jose.

Taking an existing loan approval application written in COBOL and residing in the CICS region in Dublin, we demonstrated how we could generate WSDL from the COBOL copybook. ALSB was running on an IONA Linux box in Waltham. We deployed this service as a SOAP/HTTP based Web service with Artix z/OS. Then we took ALSB and read in the WSDL and made it part of a simple routing decision - routing to an existing loan approval bean in the J2EE container for certain loan requests and to the CICS COBOL loan approval for other loan requests (based on the interest rate request). There was some transformation mapping required because the message schemas were a little different. This transformation was configured in the ALSB console.

We then ran a simple Java client that invoked on the Web service exposed by ALSB and watched as different requests were routed to different loan approval applications. Cool! We were all impressed.

The real value was demonstrated next. We decided to turn on some security on the mainframe. So we required SSL and RACF authentication. We set this up using Artix z/OS and transferred the SSL certification to ALSB (Artix would manage the RACF problem - propagating the security credentials from the SOAP headers into something that RACF would understand and then authenticate against!) Again it worked wonderfully. ALSB successfully added the security credentials to the SOAP message on the mainframe bound messages and encrypted. Artix z/OS then decrypted and authenticated against RACF and forwarded the loan approval request to the COBOL program. This really was slick.

I was on site doing going through the process but the real preparation work was performed by Alan Brown on the z/OS machine and Stan Lewis with the ALSB work. A big thanks to them!

If your a doing lots of Weblogic J2EE based development but need to reuse assets on IBM z/OS machines (CICS or IMS btw) then this is a great solution. (You should also look at Artix for other non-J2EE end-points too).

Here is the Artix z/OS documentation. For some reason the technical white paper requires a logon but this is freely available.

« March 2006 | Main Index | Archives | June 2006 »

Search

Who is IPBabble

William Henry IP Babble is the personal blog of William Henry.

William has 20 years experience in software development and distributed computing and holds a M.Sc from Dublin City University. He is currently working in the office of CTO at Red Hat on the MRG product. This weblog is not funded by Red Hat.

Posts are intended to express independent points of view, but understand that there is probably a bias based on the influence of working with standards based middleware for over a decade. (See disclaimer below)

February 2009

Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
8 9 10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
22 23 24 25 26 27 28

Disclaimer

The views expressed in this blog are solely the personal views of the author and DO NOT represent the views of his employer or any third party.

About this Archive

This page is an archive of entries from April 2006 listed from newest to oldest.

March 2006 is the previous archive.

June 2006 is the next archive.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.