Mobile and REST API solution with IBM z/OS Connect Enterprise Edition

You can build REST services and APIs to access your IMS assets by using the IMS service provider in IBM® z/OS® Connect Enterprise Edition (z/OS Connect EE). Your IMS™ applications can also make REST API calls through z/OS® Connect EE.

z/OS Connect EE provides a framework that enables z/OS-based programs and data to participate fully in the new API economy for mobile and cloud applications.

z/OS Connect EE is designed to provide a fast, secure, and reliable connector that accepts standard protocols and can interact with multiple z/OS backend programs and systems. z/OS Connect EE provides a standard interface for these assets to be identified and reached by using the Representational State Transfer (REST) technology, and services are represented in the JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format. This interface also handles data conversion as needed and provides authorization services to allow or deny users that are based on roles. In other words, z/OS Connect EE is the API gateway into z/OS, with a single, configurable, high throughput REST/JSON interface into CICS®, IMS, DB2®, and WebSphere® Application Server.

In the latest release, z/OS Connect EE V3, tooling support for creating IMS services and developing, deploying, and testing REST APIs to access the services is provided through z/OS Connect EE V3 API toolkit, an Eclipse-based workstation tool that is installed into IBM Explorer for z/OS. After an API is tested and deployed, it can be published to a developer portal. API subscription and management can be handled products such as IBM API Connect®.

z/OS Connect EE V3.0.1 adds the support for z/OS applications to act as an API consumer, issuing RESTful API calls to utilize the underlying services and data from external request endpoints.

IMS as an API provider

IMS service provider that is included in z/OS Connect EE is known as the IMS Mobile feature for building mobile services to access your IMS assets. The IMS service provider handles the communications with IMS and data transformation between JSON and byte arrays.

For more information about z/OS Connect EE and the IMS service provider, see Using the IMS service provider.

IMS as an API consumer

z/OS Connect EE provides a Build toolkit that generates, from the API documentation (Swagger document), a set of files to enable an IMS application to call a REST API through z/OS Connect EE. These files include what the z/OS Connect EE server needs to handle data mapping and data transformation, and what the IMS application needs to send the API request and process the response.

For more information, see z/OS applications to call REST APIs.

IBM z/OS Connect Enterprise Edition V3.0 Program number: 5655-CE3