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Mainframes, SOA & Sex
My colleague Cote has some interesting things to say about mainframe and why SOA is a great opportunity for the System z. I am going to quote him verbatim:
As you can imagine, most of these suggestions, or the spirit and tone of them at least, work not only for most consumer software, but also with enterprise software, in both cases, social or otherwise. Simple, very open, interoperable by virtue of Plain Old XML (POX) APIs into your system are a quick and easy win.
We've talked with many people in the mainframe space -- selling mainframes or software and services that involve mainframes -- of late about how SOA is helping drive more use of and visibility for the services that mainframes provide. Wrapping a web service (usually SOAP) around a mainframe's "functionality" (to avoid using the word "services" again ;>) opens the mainframe up to more people. As Chip said last night (not an exact quote), "if you've got a web service wrapped around it, I don't care what the back-end is, I just use the service if it's good."
It's kind of like the way screen are used to eliminate bias in symphony try-outs, as outlined in Blink. Before the use of screens to hide the sex of the musicians trying out, women rarely got selected. Once that industry started putting screens up to hide the candidates sex, more women got hired.
Some people will avoid using mainframe based services simply because they think mainframes aren't cool. Surely all that Intel Inside stuff is better, right? As can always be pointed out, people are more the drivers of technical decisions than the underlying technology. Wrap a web service around the mainframe, and you've widened the audience, adding more "nodes" to your network, and increased the mainframe's value.
More important to the analogy back to simple APIs, if you remove all the clutter, access restrictions, and bias from things like WS-*, roach motels, and sex you can focus on the service being provided: be that service submitting a PO, offering a resume, or playing music.
As far as I know, mainframes are pretty damn good at the last two. With SOA putting the screen up nobody will claim dude looks like a lady... or vice-versa.
| by James Governor | March 27, 2006 Permalink |
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Comments
James,
I love the analogy and it is interesting how the generic, common, interoperable access patterns do put a screen up around the mainframes -- being the heretic I am, I will say this is exactly what SCA and SDO attempt to do. We could argue whether it does or does not do that well, but that is the design principle: allowing invocation, composition and assembly of applications without regard for the implementation of, the hosting platform of, the sexiness of the actual service.
Steve Kinder
Posted by: Steve Kinder | Mar 31, 2006 11:23:47 AM
well said steve. thanks.
Posted by: James Governor | Apr 4, 2006 11:30:53 AM
I would go as far as to say that SOA is the best thing to happen to the mainframe since CMOS. Here at last is the opportunity to extract value from all of that great stuff that's been locked up inside the platform, without having to rewrite all of those grungy user interfaces.
Now if IBM (or any other credible vendor) would deliver a palatable set of tools for creating and deploying WS on the mainframe -and- enabling "classic" mainframe languages and runtime environments to call WS we would be in great shape. You might actually see the platform grow for a change.
And for the purists, yeah it is a hell of alot less efficient than CICS/BMS or IMS/MFS but its A LOT easier for the developers, nicer for the users and what else where you going to do with those gonzo big mips on the z's anyway? That's a match made in heaven for IBM. Let the revolution begin.
Posted by: Chris Craddock | Apr 7, 2006 8:18:15 AM
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