Web Services Support for Native and Managed COBOL

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.

.NET COBOL

Using Enterprise Developer, you can compile your COBOL applications to Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL), which uses the Microsoft .NET Framework and includes Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) integration. You can then expose your WCF applications as Web services with the COBOL application running as managed code.

This method requires OO COBOL or C# on the front end to invoke the Web service; however, you can then optionally call procedural COBOL for the back end. See Building Service-Oriented Applications with WCF and COBOL.

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.

CAUTION:

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.