Describes the functionality available in the Interface Mapping Toolkit (IMTK) that enables you to create and define a service interface based on an existing COBOL application, deploy the service interface to an enterprise server instance running the legacy application as a service, and to generate one or more clients that can access the service via the new service interface.
The IMTK enables you to create interfaces between an application running as a service, such as a Web service or Java that exposes existing COBOL programs for access from COBOL Web services and non-COBOL clients such as Java interfaces. In the context of the IMTK, we call these interfaces service interfaces. A service interface is a collection of input and output fields of a particular format used to communicate with the application via a particular protocol. You can use a service interface created with the IMTK to access a COBOL application running under COBOL Server. The IMTK supports the creation of service interfaces for COBOL batch programs only.
A service interface uses the fields available via a COBOL program's entry points in the LINKAGE section.
You can provide access to all of the functionality of an application, or you can create one or more service interfaces for specific pieces of an application. For example, if by design your application processes large amounts of information irrelevant to the common user, you can create a service interface to extract only the relevant information.
You can create the following types of service interfaces:
The COBOL applications for which you create services interfaces run under Enterprise Server.
The process of creating a working service interface includes the following: