SEAGULL Software
OpenAjax Alliance tackles interoperability
With development of the hub, the alliance is dealing with its top priority, said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink, in an e-mail response to questions.
“There is a critical need for OpenAjax at this point in time, because each vendor’s AJAX implementation is generally incompatible with the others,” Bloomberg said. “Basically, even though each AJAX widget leverages XML and JavaScript, both of which are open standards, that doesn’t mean that one widget from one toolkit will work with another widget from some other toolkit. The most important goal of OpenAjax is figuring out how to resolve this interoperability problem. Clearly, Ajax will be far more successful if any widget works with any other widget, toolkit, or platform.”
Read more at: InfoWorldMigrate Off IBM’s MDp to Seagull Software’s ‘LegaSuite for CICS(TM)’ for SOA Compliance and Improved Performance
“Enterprises are still struggling to find the best ways to rapidly implement their service oriented architecture plans,” said Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst with ZapThink, LLC. “With Seagull’s LegaSuite solution, customers can take a big step forward by ‘leapfrogging’ from an older generation of middleware straight to SOA Web services, without disrupting ongoing business operations.”
Read more at: Seagull Press ReleaseIT Uses Web Services to Preserve Data
Ron Schmelzer, an analyst at ZapThink LLC in Waltham, Mass., said about 50% of SOA initiatives are mainframebased projects because companies can preserve the mainframe but “still have applications that are just as agile and flexible as anything they could build in Java [sic] or .Net.”
Read more at: RedNovaLegacy-enablement — Web services tools ease the pain
Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst with ZapThink, notes that there is another problem as well: What he calls the “granularity issue.”
“The people who built mainframes didn’t intend to have the data accessed by non-mainframe apps,” he says, “and sometimes the data on mainframes is only accessible in very big chunks. The problem is that with Web services you often need a very small piece of data, and there’s no API for the mainframe to help you get it. That means you need some way to remediate between the two.”
In addition, he says, there are a variety of security issues, including different rules and procedures for logons on mainframes versus Web services.
A variety of other tools are helpful as well. Schmelzer points to Atlanta, Georgia-based Seagull Software Inc. as one example of a good tool for integrating mainframe applications with Web services and SOAs, and which can transform legacy applications into callable Web services. In addition, Sugar Land, Texas-based Neon Systems Inc. also sells tools for mainframe integration with Web services and SOAs.
Read more at: SearchWebServicesZapForum Webcast: Building Composite Applications with Legacy Systems
Guest Experts: Ardy Franssen, Product Management, Seagull Software and Arjen Westerink, Product Marketing, Cordys
Topics:
- Top-down vs. Bottom-up SOA
- How can you leverage legacy systems in an SOA?
- How are SOA-based composite applications different?
Setting the Stage: ZapThink Analysts
Listen to ZapThink analysts Jason Bloomberg and Ronald Schmelzer talk about how …
NetManage: Composite Application Platform with Robust Host Enablement
Incorporated in 1990, NetManage has built a deep host integration and enablement capability, with its Rumba host connectivity software, ViewNow applications for Unix connectivity, Librados adapters, and OnWeb Web-to-Host solutions. They have since expanded their offering to the Host Service Platform, which leverages OnWeb and Librados technology to provide a composite application environment with substantial host connectivity options. NetManage is now well-positioned to help companies implementing Service-Oriented Architecture to build composite applications that leverage heterogeneous host-based back-ends while providing diverse Web browser-based and Web Services interfaces to users and consuming applications.
Service Orientation Market Trends
While Web Services have been getting the attention through 2003, in 2004 the IT computing story will be focused squarely on Service Orientation. Offering an evolutionary approach to distributed computing that provides greater business agility while enabling companies to use heterogeneous resources more efficiently, Service Orientation, based on established Web Services standards, is set to fundamentally change many different IT markets as enterprises transition to Service-Oriented Architectures.
In particular, the markets of application security, security appliances, system management, application integration, data integration, and business process management are six key markets that will become transformed as vendors in those markets Service-enable their products. Furthermore, there is a window of opportunity for new entrants in each of these markets to build Service-oriented offerings. Those windows will soon close, however, as the established, incumbent vendors in each space consolidate their respective markets.
These consolidation trends will continue through the rest of the decade, as large vendors round out their suites of software that support Service Orientation, resulting in a combined market consisting of vendors offering a full-function SOA Implementation Framework. These frameworks will offer enterprises all the functionality they need to build, run, and manage SOAs. The market for SOA Implementation Frameworks is still nascent as of 2004, but will dominate the distributed computing arena by 2010.
More firms using Web services to integrate legacy apps
Products from the established mainframe players “make sense if you have investments in those technologies” that you plan on keeping for the long-term, says Ron Schmeltzer, senior analyst with consultancy ZapThink LLC, in Waltham, Mass. But if you have older technology and are not looking to upgrade, it might make more sense to go with an independent software vendor for Web services help.
Read more at: TechTargetSOA Tools and Best Practices
From its inception through 2002, the primary application for Web Services in the enterprise was to simplify point-to-point integration between systems, thereby reducing the cost of integration. This application of Web Services, however, only scratches the surface of the true potential of Web Services — enabling companies to build agile business processes and IT systems that can respond to change through the use of loosely coupled, standards-based Service-oriented architectures.
The business value of such architectures in terms of the business agility they provide is substantial, but as of early 2003, only a few early adopter enterprises have built such architectures, partly because few tools for building Service-oriented architectures are available on the market, and furthermore, there is little understanding of the best practices companies should follow to build such architectures. This report seeks to clarify the requirements for realizing the value of Web Services by providing a set of emerging best practices as well as an analysis of the tools that are currently available for building Service-oriented architectures.
Service-Oriented Integration
Connecting systems both within the enterprise and with suppliers, partners, and customers is of critical importance to today’s enterprise. However, integration remains complex, expensive, and risky. While Web Services won’t be the magic bullet that immediately solves these problems, they enable a new approach to integration. Service-Oriented Integration (SOI) leverages open standards, loose coupling, and dynamic description and discovery capabilities of Web Services to reduce the complexity, cost, and risk of integration. This report identifies the key aspects of SOI, solutions for implementing SOI, ROI metrics, and critical challenges.
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