Describes the Service Interfaces feature and provides information about creating, defining and deploying service interfaces, and generating clients to access the deployed services running on an enterprise server.
A service interface is a mechanism for accessing a COBOL application running under Enterprise Server. It is a collection of input and output fields of a particular format used to communicate with the application via a particular protocol.
A service interface uses the fields available via:
You can provide access to all of the functionality of an application, or you can create one or more interfaces for specific pieces of an application. For example, if by design your application includes large amounts of information irrelevant to the common user, you can create a service interface that includes only the relevant information.
You can create the following types of service interfaces:
The applications for which you create services interfaces run under Server Enterprise Edition. COBOL program applications can run with or without the Server Enterprise Edition Mainframe Subsystem Support (MSS). CICS and IMS applications must be deployed to an enterprise server configured for MSS.
The process of creating a working service interface includes the following:
You can also optionally capture a workflow to use as a starting point for a service interface. This process from start to finish is documented in the remaining chapters of this book.