The IMS™ SOAP Gateway is a Web service solution
that integrates IMS assets
in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) environment.
The IMS SOAP
Gateway enables IMS applications
to interoperate outside of the IMS environment through SOAP to provide and
request services independent of platform, environment, application language,
or programming model.
You can enable an IMS PL/I application or a COBOL application
for Web services by using a wizard from the Enterprise Service Tools to generate
Web service files for the specified IMS application. You then deploy these Web
service files to the IMS SOAP Gateway to make the specified IMS application
available as a Web service. Different types of client applications, such as Microsoft.NET, Java,
and third-party applications, can then submit SOAP requests into IMS to drive the
business logic of the PL/I or COBOL application.
There are two main steps to enabling your IMS application
as a Web service running in the IMS SOAP Gateway environment:
- Use the Create New Service Interface (bottom-up) wizard from the Enterprise
Service Tools to generate Web service files for your IMS application. (The generated files are
described in the next paragraph.)
- Use the IMS deployment
utility to deploy the Web service interface to IMS SOAP Gateway. (The IMS deployment
utility allows you to define connection and correlation information for the
Web service.)
In the first step, you use the Create New Service Interface
(bottom-up) wizard from the Enterprise Service Tools to generate the Web service
files from an existing PL/I source file or COBOL source
file in your IMS application.
The source file must contain the request and response interface
data structures for your IMS application. In most cases you do not have
to modify or add to your existing IMS application source code.
The wizard generates the following Web service files:
- A Web Services Description Language (WSDL) file, which describes the Web
service interface of the IMS application so that the client can communicate with
the Web service.
- A correlator file, which contains information that enables the IMS SOAP Gateway
to set the IMS properties
and call the IMS application.
- A PL/I or COBOL source file that contains a Web service
driver and runtime XML conversion programs. These runtime XML conversion programs
convert request and response data in XML format (which
is the format used by SOAP), to and from the request and
response interface data structures in your IMS application (either PL/I or COBOL).
For more information about using the IMS SOAP Gateway, including samples, see IMS SOAP
Gateway documentation and the IMS SOAP Gateway web site at http://www.ibm.com/ims.