Web-based workloads

As enterprises move many of their applications to the Web, mainframe organizations face the complexity of enabling and managing new Web-based workloads in addition to more traditional workloads, such as batch processing. This topic uses IBM® products in the examples, but many such middleware products exist in the marketplace today.

WebSphere® is IBM's integration software platform. It includes the entire middleware infrastructure— servers, services, and tools—needed to write, run, and monitor 24x7 industrial-strength, on demand Web applications and cross-platform, cross-product solutions. WebSphere provides reliable, flexible, and robust integration software.

A middleware product often includes an application programming interface (API). In some cases, applications are written to run completely under the control of this middleware API, while in other cases it is used only for unique purposes. Some examples of mainframe middleware APIs include:

The WebSphere suite of products, which provides a complete API that is portable across multiple operating systems. Among these products, WebSphere MQ provides cross-platform APIs and inter-platform messaging to facilitate application integration.
The DB database management product, which provides an API (expressed in the SQL language) that is used with many different languages and applications.

A Web server is considered to be middleware and Web programming (Web pages, CGIs, and so forth) is largely coded to the interfaces and standards presented by the Web server instead of the interfaces presented by the operating system. Java™ is another example in which applications are written to run under a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and are largely independent of the operating system being used.

z/OS® HTTP Server serves static and dynamic Web pages. HTTP Server has the same capabilities as any other Web server, but it also has some features that are z/OS-specific.