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Interface Mapping Toolkit (IMTK)

Important: We highly recommend that you do the IMTK tutorials to get a feel for using these tools. See Tutorials: Interface Mapping Toolkit (IMTK) in the Getting Started section under Native COBOL Tutorials.

The IMTK enables you to create an interface between a legacy COBOL application running on an ESI as a service, such as a Web service or Java service, and a non-COBOL client, such as a Web service client or a JSP client. The interface you create is called a service interface. In your service interface, you can expose as much or as little of the original legacy application functionality as you choose. Because legacy applications often perform a wide variety of functions, the creation of a service interface enables you to limit your end users to access only the functions they need.

In addition, you can use the IMTK to create service interfaces for several mainframe-based technologies. For details, see Interface Mapping Toolkit (IMTK) under Mainframe Programming.

You can create the following types of service interfaces for COBOL programs:

  • .NET Interface
  • Java Interface
  • SOAP Web Service
  • JSON Web Service
  • REST Web Service
Attention: To deploy or generate a client for a Java Interface, you must install and configure the Java JDK and a Java application server. See the Application Server JCA support for Enterprise Server section in the Additional Software Requirements on Windows topic.

The process of creating a working service interface includes the following:

  • Creating and configuring an enterprise server instance to run the legacy application as a service
  • Creating a service interface in an Enterprise Developer project
  • Defining the details of the service interface using the Interface Mapper
  • Deploying the legacy application and service interface to your enterprise server instance
  • Generating one or more clients to access the service running on the enterprise server instance
  • For JSON Web services, in lieu of generating a client, optionally access the service from a CORS-supported browser running an AJAX request script.
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