At this installation we have a business rules engine from a company called Corticon. The interface to the Corticon servers is via SOAP web services. We also have Windows Web Servers that expose ASP.Net Web Services.
We need to be able to access these web services from Batch COBOL programs. I have developed a solution that seems to work well enough. In my architecture, batch programs invoke CICS programs via the EXCI interface. These CICS programs in turn issue the EXEC CICS INVOKE WEBSERVICE commands. So far so good. But I have concerns about this architecture. For one, it requires the CICS region to be alive when we are processing Batch Runs in the evening. And I wish performance was a bit better. So, I wonder if there is a better way? I know that Batch COBOL invoking a JAVA Web Client is possible and I have seen stuff in the IBM-MAIN archives talking about the JZOS Batch Toolkit developed by the guys at Dovetailed Technologies. But I am a bit hesitant since I have heard stories about poor performance. So my questions for the list: (1) How many have gone this route for consuming web services from a Batch COBOL client? (2) How easy/tricky to setup and code? (3) What kind of performance? (4) Are there any comparisons between the JAVA approach versus the EXCI/CICS approach re performance, developer effort, etc? John ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
