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.
IP Babble is the personal blog of William Henry.
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