Flexible Mainframe Web Service Design - Top Down or Bottom Up

Most mainframe integration and SOA solutions only support a bottom-up design methodology and as a result organizations are forced to use this methodology and achieve minimal results. Support for both Bottom-Up and Top-Down web service design is critical to a successful SOA solution.

In the bottom-up approach the tool exclusively controls the generation of the WSDL, typically based strictly on mainframe data structures.  This means, you only get the XML data structures provided by that tool and any customization of the WSDL definition will have to be done manually.  The bottom-up web service design approach is common across industry tools and is very easily accomplished through Ivory Service Architect but Ivory also offers robust support for top-down web service design which others don’t.

Ivory’s Top-Down web service design truly allows external business processes and tools to drive the definition of the Web service and has been shown to be a best practice for mainframe SOA. This approach allows the web service developer to work in advance with the user(s) who need the service, identifying the consumer’s functional and data requirements, and then mapping the mainframe components to the service requirements.

Having this design flexibility, the Ivory developer builds an integrated business service that automates all the steps and operations required to fulfill those requirements, which ensures that the components of the architecture are optimally designed and sized to promote maximum reuse and efficiency.

Further adding to the advantages of Top-down design, Ivory supports the import of WSDL and XML schemas that have been defined outside of Ivory.  This means that you can import any WSDL that has been generated from UML tools, written by hand, or by any other product.  This greatly speeds the development of mainframe services that seamlessly “plug into” the rest of the SOA infrastructure.