Rescue service for mainframe data

Computerworld - Mainframes and legacy systems have presented IT executives with a dilemma for much of the past decade. In the race to move IT operations to the Web in the 1990s, many companies considered dumping the aging systems altogether. Yet, these "dinosaurs" usually contained mission-critical data the companies wanted to preserve and integrate into newer Web applications, and so they survived until the dot-com implosion.

Since then, many companies haven't had the resources—or often the inclination—to replace mainframes and other older IT assets that hum steadily along and are the incarnation of decades of investment. Those systems still handle high volumes of transactions—and the data they generate—securely and reliably. This leaves IT shops searching for methods to get to the data housed in the systems so that it can be used in Web-based applications—and they'd like to do it without rewriting code. Complicating the picture is the fact that mainframes were designed as discrete single functions, creating problems for companies that need to give Web-based applications access to several different silos on back-end systems.

Now, with growing corporate interest in service-oriented architectures (SOA), companies are looking at using Web services to more easily integrate data from older back-end systems such as IBM mainframes and AS/400s, Unix/OpenVMS systems and Hewlett-Packard e3000s into newer applications.

For example, construction company Shea Homes is using Web services to integrate a green-screen J.D. Edwards home-construction application running on IBM AS/400 with newer enterprise applications without having to rely on hard coding.

Mike Little, senior technical manager at Walnut, Calif.-based Shea, says he integrated the older module in less than two weeks using tools from WRQ Inc., a process he describes as "screen scraping on steroids." Writing custom code for the integration would have taken more than four months, he adds.

Seattle-based WRQ's Verastream tools are designed to expose legacy application logic as Component Object Model (COM), Java, .Net or Web services components that can then be used in Web applications or added to newer enterprise applications like CRM systems. Verastream adapters establish communications with the host system, and integration tools allow users to point and click to abstract legacy functions as components, according to WRQ.

"It is very easy to go through and set up the navigation through the screens," Little says. "They have an automated way to take what you have created and generate a Web service without generating any custom code."

Employees at Shea can now access information from the J.D. Edwards system in real time instead of waiting for batch-processing jobs to run. And the Web services can be reused, Little says.