Important: We highly recommend that you do the IMTK tutorials to get a feel for using these tools. See
Tutorials: Interface Mapping Toolkit (IMTK) in the
Getting Started section under
Native COBOL Tutorials.
The IMTK enables you to create an interface between a legacy COBOL application running on an
ESI as a service, such as a Web service or Java service, and a non-COBOL client, such as a Web service client or a JSP client. The interface you create is called a
service interface. In your service interface, you can expose as much or as little of the original legacy application functionality as you choose. Because legacy applications often perform a wide variety of functions, the creation of a service interface enables you to limit your end users to access only the functions they need.
In addition, you can use the IMTK to create service interfaces for several mainframe-based technologies. For details, see
Interface Mapping Toolkit (IMTK) under
Mainframe Programming.
You can create the following types of service interfaces for COBOL programs:
- .NET Interface
- Java Interface
- SOAP Web Service
- JSON Web Service
- REST Web Service
Attention: To deploy or generate a client for a Java Interface, you must install and configure the Java JDK and a Java application server. See the
Application Server JCA support for Enterprise Server section in the
Additional Software Requirements on Windows topic.
The process of creating a working service interface includes the following:
- Creating and configuring an
enterprise server instance to run the legacy application as a service
- Creating a service interface in an
Enterprise Developer project
- Defining the details of the service interface using the
Interface Mapper
- Deploying the legacy application and service interface to your
enterprise server instance
- Generating one or more clients to access the service running on the
enterprise server instance
- For JSON Web services, in lieu of generating a client, optionally access the service from a CORS-supported browser running an AJAX request script.
