The IMTK enables you to create interfaces between an application running as a service, such as a Web service or Java that exposes existing COBOL programs for access from COBOL Web services and non-COBOL clients such as Java interfaces
and .NET interfaces. In the context of the IMTK, we call these interfaces
service interfaces. A service interface is a collection of input and output fields of a particular format used to communicate with the application via a particular protocol. You can use a service interface created with the IMTK to access a COBOL application running under
Enterprise Test Server.
You can provide access to all of the functionality of an application, or you can create one or more service interfaces for specific pieces of an application. For example, if by design your application processes large amounts of information irrelevant to the common user, you can create a service interface to extract only the relevant information.
You can create the following types of service interfaces:
The COBOL
applications for which you create services interfaces run under
Enterprise Server.
COBOL
applications can run with or without the
Enterprise Server Mainframe Subsystem Support (MSS). CICS and IMS applications must be deployed to an enterprise server configured for MSS.
The process of creating a working service interface includes the following:
- Configuring an enterprise server to run the service
- Creating a service interface in a project
- Defining the details of the service interface
- Deploying the service interface
- Generating one or more clients to access the service running on the enterprise server
