Evaluation of application servers and mainframe connectors

Industry

Banking & Insurances

Project scope

The application service provider wants to offer his customers competitive services and hence, requested innovative, cost-efficient, and integrated applications. The plan was to develop new applications based on a common J2EE infrastructure. The use of Enterprise JavaBeans architecture should ensure the realization of new business processes as well as the integration of existing COBOL/IMS functionality.

The main task was to come up with a recommendation regarding the future application server platform and to develop an optimal solution for integrating the functional logic of COBOL/IMS.

Approach

Together with our consultants, a functional application using EJB technology was developed and run on two application servers. The test application was linked to the existing COBOL applications by four different IMS connectors. Besides supervising this development, our consultants guided the load and stress testing as well as the workshops responsible for designing a suitable IMS connection. Our consultants came up with an automatic procedure which ‘at the push of a button’ generated the specific systems for the respective application server and the host connectors from the functional application. Using a customer-specific benchmark, we could finally come up with recommendations concerning an application server and IMS connectors to connect to the mainframe.

Project data

Information technologies

• BEA WebLogic unter Solaris und AIX
• IBM WebSphere unter z/OS
• IONA Mainframe Integrator IMS Edition
• IBM IMS Connect
• IBM APPC Connector
• BEA Java Adapter for Mainframe
• Borland JBuilder Enterprise
• IMS DC und DB
• IBM DB2 für z/OS