Ivory™ Studio and Ivory Server continue to improve their support of IBM CICS Transaction Server
Atlanta, GA - April 19, 2005 – GT Software, Inc., an IBM Business Partner and mainframe integration solution provider, today announced release 2.1.2 of Ivory™ Web Services. The Ivory Process for Web Services now offers support for channel and container processing provided by the recently announced CICS TS version 3.1. This continues the commitment GT Software has to its business partners. As IBM clients take advantage of support in CICS Transaction Server 3.1, the suite of Ivory products exploit the IBM improvements. Steve Able, VP of Research and Development, stated; "GT Software values its business partner relationship with IBM and is committed to supporting new versions of CICS Transaction Server."
Channel/Container Support – Ivory Studio and Ivory Server have been enhanced to provide native support for named containers passed via the IBM channel support. Ivory has extended Callable services by allowing the choice of COMMAREA or channel containers as the interface method. Ivory channel and container support will allow clients to build new composite applications that take advantage of the flexibility provided with the enhanced storage management process of CICS TS 3.1.
Reference Storage Support – Ivory continues to improve its support for COMMAREA-based applications by allowing support for applications that pass storage areas via pointers. Ivory will support any number of referenced storage areas by giving a unique name to each section of referenced storage. Ivory properties offer options to control storage management of the referenced storage areas.
Web Service Deployment – Many installations are faced with change management issues that require different departments to be involved with the change process. With the introduction of Ivory Web service deployment, any authorized department or individual can deploy the Ivory projects to their QA or production environments. The log files of the deployment process can also be stored in the client's change control system to meet audit trail requirements of the change management process.
WSDL Importing – Ivory Studio now supports importing of WSDL files created by other software; this allows clients to take advantage of existing meta data used by other Web services. The Ivory Studio WSDL discovery supports UDDI, Disco, Web service discovery and local file systems. The Ivory Studio WSDL editor can be used to modify the imported file to meet the requirements of the new business process.
Dynamic Runtime Modifications – Ivory Studio and Ivory Server provide additional controls over the logic flow processing by allowing information from 3270 BMS applications or CICS programs to modify the runtime process. Some usage examples are: customization of security, Web service end-point modification, customized SOAP fault messages and logic flow modifications. Most text-based properties in Ivory Studio allow use of work variables to modify the Ivory Server logic flow processing.
Integrated Web Service Test Tool – With the introduction of CICS TS 3.1, support for HTTP 1.1 is available in CICS TCP/IP services. The Ivory Studio test tool has been modified to allow selection of the HTTP version of 1.0 or 1.1. The test tool supports authentication, saved test cases can be reloaded, and when accessing Ivory Web services the server trace files can be displayed. The tool also provides WSDL discovery for testing Web services provided by other servers.
Web Service Prototyping – The graphical Web service designer in Ivory Studio has been enhanced to provide additional methods for building Web service prototypes. Ivory Studio in conjunction with the logic flow processor of Ivory Server provides clients with the ability to build deploy and test Web service prototypes.
Ivory Web Services provides composite application processing for 3270 BMS applications, COMMAREA, out-bound Web services, DBMS systems and now CICS TS 3.1 channel / container applications.
