SOA is becoming the preferred method of developing new business solutions. Everyone developing in a green field environment should be using SOA, but very few people have this luxury.
The biggest stumbling block, delaying wholesale SOA implementation, is the plethora of existing systems that do not provide an SOA interface. Should they be re-engineered to create a web services interface, or can an interface be created by wrapping or indirection?
Nowhere is this problem more pressing than on the mainframe because:
- The many existing mainframe transactions should provide a rich seam of useful services.
- The average CICS COBOL program does not understand the alphabet soup of web services.
- The owners of these transactions are justly proud of their reliability, performance and security and are wary of distributed applications and programmers accessing them directly.
