On 29/10/2013 4:47 PM, Timothy Sipples wrote:
David Crayford writes:
I wonder if there is a market for mainframe legacy applications to
access NoSQL data stores?
Of course. Case in point: the IBM DB2 Analytics Accelerator. The PureData
System for Analytics which powers the IDAA is, as it happens, a "NoSQL"
data store. However, applications keep using SQL to access something NoSQL,
including now static SQL.
Most MVC web frameworks use an ORM framework. Relational data bases and OO
languages don't work well together due to the object-relational
impedance mismatch. What's
the point of using SQL with a NoSQL data base when you can just
serialize data into something like BSON? Adding another
layer of complexity is pointless.
We've perhaps come full circle. :-) I'm not big on the political/religious
wars, though, about relational v. non-relational. They're both wonderful in
my view, just as airplanes and railway locomotives are both wonderful.
Everything always comes full circle. I was watching music videos with
the kids last week and a hip new female rock band
came on sporting headbands, kaftans and were laying down some seriously
fat 70s rock riffs. Cool!
Interestingly, when you look under the covers of the new breed of web
servers/frameworks there is something very familiar.
node.js, nginx and even data stores like Redis are all driven by
asynchronous, non-blocking event loops. They all
use a single thread to process thousands of concurrent connections. It
reminds me of CICS and the QR-TCB. Even
the programming models, node.js callbacks etc are similar to CICS
quasi-reentrant programming. Get in/out as quickly as
possible and wait for an event. The Reactor pattern is certainly not new
but it's been simplified to work well with simple but
powerful dynamic programming languages.
You asked about JSON. Sure, no problem. There are many ways. To pick an
example, for CICS Transaction Server (as far back as Version 4.2), there's
the CICS Transaction Server Feature Pack for Mobile Extensions, available
at no additional charge here:
http://www.ibm.com/software/htp/cics/mobile/
I've already read that. It's interesting to see the solution for mapping
JSON from static languages like COBOL. I'm sure it works well.
Wouldn't it be great if CICS web services could be as simple as Sinatra
using JRuby.
You weren't specific about IMS Transaction Manager or IMS Database, so I'll
try to answer both ways. Of course routes via CICS Transaction Server work
if you have CICS TS. If you don't have CICS TS then you could use WebSphere
Message Broker for z/OS. Or you could use IBM Worklight in conjunction with
the standard IMS-included connectors. IBM Worklight is available for Linux
on zEnterprise today, and there's sn IBM Statement of Direction to make
Worklight available for z/OS as well. Worklight does much more than the use
case you describe, but it covers that use case, too.
Yet another example is via WebSphere Application Server for z/OS, either as
a full WAS instance or via a WebSphere Liberty Profile deployment on z/OS.
There are various JSON approaches that work within that context, too, if
you would prefer a Java Enterprise Edition (JEE) or JEE subset approach.
I've recently been writing web servers using Lua/Orbit. It may not
offload to a zIIP but it's just so much easier than WAS/Java.
Still yet another example (depending on what you're doing) is to come in
via the z/OS Management Facility interfaces.
That's a very nice interface for scheduling and monitoring jobs from
distributed platforms. Hopefully the first of many.
Anyway, those are just a few examples. There are others.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Timothy Sipples
GMU VCT Architect Executive (Based in Singapore)
E-Mail: sipp...@sg.ibm.com
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