IMS Web 2.0 solutions

IMS provides Web 2.0 solutions to unleash your IMS assets into XML, Atom, or RSS feeds through IBM Mashup Center and IBM WebSphere® sMash.

Web 2.0 empowers users to manipulate data and combine various services into a single Web experience. It also enables businesses to gain a competitive edge when they put the vast amounts of data they own about themselves and their customers to creative uses.

IBM Mashup Center provides visual tools for creating, storing, transforming, and remixing feeds to be used in mashup and situational applications. It also offers a central catalog for users to tag, rate, and share assets. With the built-in IMS support in IBM Mashup Center, enterprise data can be made available to the Web 2.0 community, and your users can further remix and mash up the data to meet their business needs.

IBM WebSphere® sMash is an agile Web application platform and environment for developing and running applications that are based on Web 2.0 technologies. WebSphere sMash provides an agile, dynamic scripting environment and an integrated runtime component for building and running Representational State Transfer (REST)-style services. Developers can use visual tooling and scripting languages such as PHP and Groovy to quickly create widgets. The widgets can be assembled into new Web applications by using IBM Mashup Center.

IBM Mashup Center provides a rich, effective Web interface to unlock information buried in information silos. Business users can quickly uncover new business insights by assembling information from multiple sources in a browser.

In IBM Mashup Center Version 2, you can create Atom feeds from both IMS transactions and IMS databases. With the embedded IMS Web 2.0 functionality, you can:

• Create Atom feeds from IMS transactions that run on IMS Version 11 and IMS Version 10, with integrated IMS Connect.

• Create Atom feeds from IMS databases that run on IMS Version 11 through the IMS Universal DB resource adapter.

• Easily customize IMS transactions without the need to modify the original application. Through a Web interface, you can specify which input parameters to expose to users, as well as the default parameter values to invoke the feed. Feeds can be further restructured and customized by using the operators and functions of IBM Mashup Center.

• Use the tooling support in IBM Rational® Developer for System z® to generate the required XML converter driver and correlator. The XML converter driver is used by IMS Connect to transform the data between XML and bytes. The correlator is used to map the request and response messages to the input and output data structures of the IMS application. IMS Version 11 and IMS Version 10 customers are entitled to two complimentary, unwarranted copies of Rational Developer for System z.

• Utilize the IMS Enterprise Suite DLIModel utility plug-in to translate IMS source files into metadata files. The metadata files describe the relational database view that enables you to issue SQL queries to the database in IBM Mashup Center to create a feed. Feeds can be further restructured and customized in IBM Mashup Center.

WebSphere sMash has several key features and components:

• A programming model for building Web 2.0 applications by using REST principles

• An assemble component for accessing and assembling services

• A reliable transport extension for message communications

• A lightweight HTTP runtime component

You can develop Web 2.0 applications in WebSphere sMash to access IMS assets by using IMS Enterprise Suite Connect API for Java™.