Using
Enterprise Developer, you can choose from several methods provided to expose COBOL as Web services, and in some cases, deploy and run your Web services on
Enterprise Server. In addition, you can also generate client applications to access your Web services:
- Interface Mapping Toolkit (IMTK)
- Starting with a native COBOL program, you can create a Web service interface using the Interface Mapping Toolkit (IMTK) feature in
Enterprise Developer, and then deploy the service to
Enterprise Server. See
Interface Mapping using the IMTK
for details.
Note: Enterprise Server supports document/literal, RPC/encoded, and REST encoding styles.
- WSDL or JSON File
- Starting with a WSDL or JSON file, you can generate both a COBOL Program Web service that is deployable to
Enterprise Server, and a COBOL application console client to access the service.
- COBOL JVM
- COBOL deployed under a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) can take advantage of Java SDKs and frameworks such as the Web Tooling Platform (WTP). This enables Web services integration with Tomcat and other application servers.
Because Eclipse tools are configured to generate Java Web services and not COBOL Web services, you must use Java on the front end. A Java class receives the request and then calls COBOL to perform the back-end processing.
COBOL JVM supports all Web service protocols provided by the Java Web services framework, including REST, but does not support the generation of COBOL clients from WSDL.
- Calling COBOL from Another Language
- You can call COBOL using any of a wide variety of other programming languages. Some of these languages have direct Web services support through tooling and Application Server deployment.
When developing a Web service using this method, be sure to include a failsafe to address the scenario in which the COBOL program crashes or issues a STOP RUN when executed in the same process of an Application Server. Failure to address this scenario introduces the risk of bringing down the Application Server.
