By Willy Farrell
Senior Software Engineer
IBM Rational Software
Banks and insurance companies can reduce operating costs and redundancies by modernizing core banking applications, and streamlining claims processing and policy administration applications. Revamping these applications can also increase a company’s overall flexibility and ability to accommodate future, unforeseen process changes. Transitioning to a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) provides the basis for such modernization.
Converting such complex business processes can seem an overwhelming task; however, the compelling need to reduce costs and increase productivity leaves little choice. Asset inventory, mainframe application analysis, and logic capture tools, as well as software development environments designed for IBM System z developers, can simplify your task.
|
Applications and systems that support core banking and insurance processes usually reside on a mainframe. These applications can be integrated into a SOA and reused in modernized applications. Re-using the functionality and logic of working mainframe applications in new SOA processes can significantly reduce the development costs of the modernization effort while harnessing the inherent security and reliability of the mainframe. Additionally, integrating these applications into SOA allows other enterprise applications to use them, too.
First find out what you have
The first step is to inventory and analyze existing applications enterprise-wide. IBM provides two products that greatly reduce the time to create such an inventory and significantly enhance the analysis of existing software assets. IBM WebSphere Studio Asset Analyzer and IBM Rational Transformation Workbench determine and store asset relationships, dependencies and semantics.
WebSphere Studio Asset Analyzer scans both mainframe and distributed software assets and stores the related application information in a mainframe-based repository. This tool can relieve project teams from the task of conducting a labor-intensive, error-prone inventory.
By understanding what software assets are available and how they are related, WebSphere Studio Asset Analyzer helps analysts, developers, architects and operations teams cut through the complexity of their assets and application interdependencies. The tool helps you understand your applications at a semantic level across the entire enterprise to identify the impact of a proposed change faster and with fewer errors.
Because it is based on an open architecture, WebSphere Studio Asset Analyzer delivers insight via two methods: an interactive Web browser and a programmatic Web services interface. Web browser access eliminates the need to install a client specific to WebSphere Studio Asset Analyzer. The Web services interface facilitates integration with other development tools.
Figure 1 shows how WebSphere Studio Asset Analyzer inventories both mainframe and distributed environment development artifacts, stores the application metadata in a repository, and provides impact analysis and improved application understanding to users through a Web browser, and to other tools through a Web services interface.
Figure 1: IBM WebSphere Studio Asset Analyzer inventories development artifacts; stores metadata on the artifacts; and provides insight on changing and using the artifacts.
Uncover business logic for reuse
With the inventory compiled and the high-level impact analysis performed by WebSphere Studio Asset Analyzer, IBM Rational Transformation Workbench provides deeper application analysis, business rule management, and component and service identification to help you prepare the code for re-use.
A bridge function in WebSphere Studio Asset Analyzer lets you load the information about your applications and software into Rational Transformation Workbench. A bill of material list (BOM) points to mainframe-based source code, which is loaded into the workbench using FTP, as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: The WebSphere Studio Asset Analyzer bridge lets you pull information about your applications and associated source code into the Rational Transformation Workbench.
Rational Transformation Workbench provides a powerful querying engine that locates exactly those portions of an application that are of interest for analysis, and helps developers focus on what matters most in the current business scenario.
For example, an analyst or developer may want to understand how certain kinds of transactions flow through the system. Rational Transformation Workbench isolates the flow from other transactions, providing more complete and rapid understanding. Using sophisticated search algorithms, the tool can also identify, document and organize business rules embedded in applications.
With the exact areas of interest and the underlying business rules identified, the componentization function of Rational Transformation Workbench lets you separate the application code into fully-functional segments for use as reusable services for your SOA.
Those segments can then be turned into Web services with IBM Rational Host Access Transformation Services (HATS), without re-writing or re-engineering. HATS version 7.1 provides a visual macro editor that significantly improves developer productivity, allowing for easier handling of alternate and error flows, and helping to decrease the number of logic and flow problems by clearly visualizing the flow.
Use tools designed for System z developers
To help you finish the streamlined application, IBM Rational provides two development environments for mainframe developers: IBM Rational Developer for System z and IBM Rational Business Developer.
Rational Developer for System z consists of a common workbench and an integrated set of tools that support end-to-end, model-based development, run-time testing, and rapid deployment of applications. It offers an Eclipse-based integrated development environment (IDE) with advanced, easy-to-use tools and features to help Web, CICS, and IMS developers rapidly design, code and deploy complex applications.
In addition to supporting multiple programming languages (Java, COBOL, PL/I, C/C++), Rational Developer for System z also provides powerful Web services and SOA development tools to help you rapidly create well-built composite applications that integrate transactional and Web environments.
The solution includes tools to help you create:
- CICS Web services, from a new or existing CICS application.
- IMS SOAP Gateway Web services that use new or existing IMS applications as Web services.
- Comprehensive Web services that collect and process data from multiple sources, including CICS non-terminal and terminal applications and other Web services.
- Web interfaces to multiple, composite services.
Rational Business Developer, on the other hand, is specifically designed to fulfill the needs of business-oriented developers. It provides a comprehensive development workbench for Enterprise Generation Language (EGL), an easy-to-learn and use modern language that uses a simpler and more abstract development paradigm for cross-platform, transactional, and data-centric services and applications.
The tool’s code generation engine can transform EGL source code into Java or COBOL for deployment to a variety of application hosting environments, including Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) and traditional transaction systems. EGL hides the details of the target execution platforms and associated middleware, freeing the developer to focus on the business problem. Figure 3 illustrates the target environments for Rational Business Developer-created applications and services.
Figure 3: Rational Business Developer target platforms
Simplify banking and insurance application modernization with the right tools
You can simplify your move to SOA and modernize mainframe-based applications with IBM tools. First, inventory and analyze existing mainframe applications to understand what you have. Then, identify business logic that can be incorporated into services. Finally, use development environments designed for System z developers to assemble the services.
|
