Today, the mainframe has new life as a hardware platform. It is being used for core business processing of existing large, enterprise applications, and its role is extending to become the backbone of an SOA environment.
IBM® provides today’s developer application lifecycle tools for both these environments allowing practitioners to leverage existing skills to more easily develop and maintain traditional screen-based applications and develop new Java™ and component-based applications that incorporate reuse of existing assets in an SOA environment.
IBM developerWorks offers thorough technical resources to support your mainframe development and operations efforts, as follows:
System z
™: Primarily for system operations staff and developers of traditional mainframe applications. Learn how to deploy and manage your existing applications and ensure they perform at their highest level. Also learn how to extend them to your Web applications with the latest IBM and open standard technologies such as Java.
Rational® Business Developer Extension: Primarily for developers of business oriented applications based on COBOL and other traditional techniques. Learn how to use RBDE to write business logic, which then generates COBOL or Java code depending upon the deployment platform, hiding middleware and low-level programming details to let you be productive more quickly.
Rational: Primarily for software designers and architects. You'll find trial downloads of the latest IBM Rational software design and modeling tools as well as expert guidance on application architecture and design.
WebSphere® on System z: Primarily for SOA, Java, and other modern application developers writing new applications to leverage the power of the mainframe. See tutorials, articles, and downloads to help you write Java, SOA, and/or component-based applications optimized to make the most of System z and the mainframe platform.
WebSphere
®: Particularly for the WebSphere Process Server area, this zone is primarily for line-of-business application designers and developers working to optimize and rationalize the business flow realized by their applications. Learn how to use the latest IBM WebSphere tools and middleware platform to develop processes that reflect the way your business works and help you meet your business goals.
