Enabling an application for the IMS Enterprise Suite SOAP Gateway

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The IMS Enterprise Suite SOAP Gateway is a Web service solution that integrates IMS assets in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) environment.

The SOAP Gateway enables IMS applications to interoperate outside of the IMS environment through SOAP to provide and request services independent of platform, environment, application language, or programming model.

You can enable an IMS PL/I application or a COBOL application for Web services by using a wizard from the Enterprise Service Tools to generate Web service files for the specified IMS application. You then deploy these Web service files to the SOAP Gateway to make the specified IMS application available as a Web service. Different types of client applications, such as Microsoft.NET, Java™, and third-party applications, can then submit SOAP requests into IMS to drive the business logic of the PL/I or COBOL application.

There are two main steps to enabling your IMS application as a Web service running in the IMS Enterprise Suite SOAP Gateway environment:
  1. Use the Create New Service Interface (bottom-up) wizard from the Enterprise Service Tools to generate Web service files for your IMS application. (The generated files are described in the next paragraph.)
  2. Use the IMS deployment utility to deploy the Web service interface to the SOAP Gateway. (The IMS deployment utility allows you to define connection and correlation information for the Web service.)

In the first step, you use the Create New Service Interface (bottom-up) wizard from the Enterprise Service Tools to generate the Web service files from an existing PL/I source file or COBOL source file in your IMS application. The source file must contain the request and response interface data structures for your IMS application. In most cases you do not have to modify or add to your existing IMS application source code.

The wizard generates the following Web service files:
  • A Web Services Description Language (WSDL) file, which describes the Web service interface of the IMS application so that the client can communicate with the Web service.
  • A correlator file, which contains information that enables the IMS Enterprise Suite SOAP Gateway to set the IMS properties and call the IMS application.
  • A PL/I or COBOL source file that contains a Web service driver and runtime XML conversion programs. These runtime XML conversion programs convert request and response data in XML format (which is the format used by SOAP), to and from the request and response interface data structures in your IMS application (either PL/I or COBOL).

For more information about using the IMS Enterprise Suite SOAP Gateway, including samples, see IMS Enterprise Suite SOAP Gateway documentation and the IMS Enterprise Suite SOAP Gateway Web site at http://www.ibm.com/ims.