Over the past five years, there has been significant discussion in the marketplace regarding mainframe Web services.
What are Web services? According to Gartner, "Web services are software components that employ one or more of three technologies -- SOAP, WSDL and UDDI -- to perform distributed computing. Use of any of the basic technologies constitutes Web services. Use of all of them is not required."
More important than Web services alone, is the concept of service-oriented architecture (SOA). Yefim Natis, Gartner, describes SOA "as a software architecture that starts with an interface definition and builds the entire application topology as a topology of interfaces, interface implementations and interface calls. While Web services do not always translate to SOA, and not all SOA is based on strict Web services, the relationship between the two technology directions is important and they are mutually influential: Web services momentum will bring SOA to mainstream users, and the best-practice architecture of SOA will help make Web services initiatives successful."
Web services can be used to create new applications, or to wrap around existing legacy applications to make them network enabled. Organizations are using third party tooling to wrap CICS, IMS, CA-IDMS, Natural, DB2, VSAM, and many other mainframe application and data sources as Web services. Mainframe Web services allow simplified integration between the mainframe applications, business, and data logic with other technologies and applications that reside off the mainframe.
Web services have transformed the mainframe platform. Where the mainframe was previously locked away in the ivory towers of the enterprise data center, it is now at the forefront of the integration and services revolution.
