Architectural considerations when developing a .Net solution with intergaration to Legacy apps

Architectural considerations when developing a .Net solution with intergaration to Legacy apps

• Rateesh

  Thanks Ron & Arnon. The links and opinions you have shared have taken me to the direction that I was looking for.
  Thanks for the guidance
  
  -Sai
  
  

• Guido Schrage

  Hi Spyros,

  We've done a lot of mainframe integration here.  The approach that has worked fine for us is to use Host Integration Server (HIS) to provide access to the transactions on the Server.  HIS provides either COM or Web Services interfaces that are then easily accessible.  You will strike issues with buffering requests and responses and possibly with synchronising between applications.  MSMQ is the answer for this, or BizTalk Server would be even better if you want the gold-plated solution.  MSMQ has worked fine for us in the past.

  IBM also have a solution that provides Web Services interfaces to CICS transactions, but you will still need to look to some form of queuing (MSMQ, MQSeries) solution to provide buffering.

  Regards,

  Kevin

  
  
  

• Rodrigo Kassab

  Have you checked on http://www.microsoft.com/mainframe or http://www.mainframemigration.org for any info or contacts Or the Host Integration Server site

  If you share some more details about your problems, I am sure we can find some guidance.

  
  
  

• Makutaku

  Saikalyan wrote:

  Trouble is I can change the interface to the legacy application. So taking all this into consideration  can anyone share some thoughts into what can be done at the architecture to address the same

  I am assuming you ment "Can't" rather than Can

  You would probably want to add a queue in between the component that handles the requests from the web and the component that is responsible to establish the connection with the legacy side.

  This way you can control both the interaction with the user (for example return an initial response immidiatly after you queue the request and then use AJAX-like methods to return the result once it is available) and the "connection pooling" working aginst the legacy app.

  Arnon

  
  
  

• myaspng1

  You should take a look at our good friend "ABE" Applied Integration Baseline Reference Implementation from patterns & practices.  This architecture features a web application with connections to a mainframe and remote data centers.  The one challenge that is similar to yours in this case was that the remote data center call could take a very long time.  They used a pattern known as Half-sync/Half-Async to make an Async call to this remote data center through a message broker using the pub/sub pattern.  Whew! that's a mouthful of patterns!

  At any rate - the source is available with this and there is good documentation to study along with a flash version of the narrator that walks you through the architecture voiced over by yours truly.

  Good luck!

  
  
  

• Qiong Ou

  Would Host Integration server support RPG based servers. Currently psconnect tool is being used. I have very little info on the capabilities of psconnect at the moment.
  
  -Sai
  
  

• Sanjay More - webwaretech

  For RPG based applications that reside on the AS/400, iSeries, etc take a look at http://www.microsoft.com/midrange. You will find a lot of different solutions there from various Microsoft Partners..
  
  
• Architectural considerations when developing a .Net solution with intergaration to Legacy apps