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Integrating 3270 applications with a SOA

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Currently I'm working on the implementation of a kind of service oriented architecture, with  the challenge (isn't it the right way of calling it) of integrating a bunch of 3270 applications -about 2K green screens-.

The solution design we are working on is consuming the 3270 screen on a middleware (BizTalk 2004) via XML. For the translation between the 3270 maps and XML we are considering a couple of tools, OnWeb and myEXTRA!

A curious mix between old and new fashion.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 30, 2004
    Jose -

    I'm a consultant for an ISV. We are releasing this month a new interface to our existing middleware product called Shadow. Shadow is different than most 3270 screen scrapping technologies in that it resides on the mainframe instead of having a NT/UNIX gateway server.

    There are a few different approaches you can take with Shadow, but one example would be: Installing Shadow's ODBC driver and using ADO.NET to make requests to Shadow. Behind the scenes Shadow takes in a CALL stored procedure SQL request and invokes a script on the mainframe to interact with the 3270 screens, the data from the screens are then mapped into an ADO record-set back to the VB or C# program that can either take the result-set(DataAdapter) as XML into a WebService or remote it to BizTalk. Or possibly have BizTalk talk directly to the ODBC datasource.

    The key is that you would have stepped though the 3270 screens before hand and compiled the mainframe script. This script can be taylored and can call multiple transactions or screens per a single request.