The company said the new product makes it possible to develop and deploy web
services-based service-oriented architectures on the mainframe. Service-oriented architectures are said to hold advantages in componentization and reusability over more rigid application development schemes.
The company said Artix Mainframe is intended for enterprises with extensive investments in IMS, CICS, or both.
Iona said its product extends the life and value of these mainframe systems by making it possible for mainframe developers to expose IMS and CICS Commarea transactions as web services in a larger service-oriented architecture. Commarea is a common communications area where mainframe application logic and presentation logic stored in separate regions can communicate with one another.
These reusable business-level services are then accessible to other developers or applications, which means that trusted mainframe transactions can be combined and reused in new enterprise applications operating on other platforms, according to Iona.
Artix Mainframe is available in two versions: Artix Mainframe Developer, intended for users of Iona’s Corba-based Orbix Mainframe product; and Artix Mainframe Transformer, intended for those organizations that have decided to use service-oriented architectures to extend their legacy applications.
Artix Mainframe Transformer provides a suite of Windows-based GUI tools for automating and managing the creation of new web services interfaces to IMS and CICS transactions, without the need for coding or code generation.
Artix Mainframe is available now for z/OS 1.2 or 1.4; OS/390 2.10; IMS 7 or 8 and CICS TS 1.3 or 2.2. Existing products in the Artix family include Relay for middleware interoperability and Encompass for web services integration.
This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire
