Web Enablement Toolkit by Stephen Warren
The proliferation of web services applications utilizing the Internet in recent years has been staggering. RESTful applications using HTTP as a means of communication and sending JSON or XML data is as common as it gets in the mobile, client/server world. Wouldn't it be cool if your existing z/OS applications running in traditional environments could easily ramp up to play in the game as well through a set of base z/OS® services available to any program on z/OS? Enter the new z/OS Client Web Enablement toolkit! The toolkit enables these applications to more easily participate in this client/server space by providing a built-in:
- z/OS JSON parser to parse JSON text coming from any source and the ability to build new JSON text or add to existing JSON text
- z/OS HTTP/HTTPS protocol enabler using interfaces similar in nature to other industry-standard APIs.
Just about all environments on z/OS can avail themselves of these new services. Of particular interest are traditional z/OS programs running in native z/OS apart from either a z/OS UNIX® or Java® Virtual Machine (JVM) environment, which have little or no options available to them currently to participate in web services applications. Programs running as a batch job, as a started procedure or running in almost any address space on a z/OS system now have APIs that they can utilize in a similar manner to any standard z/OS APIs provided by the operating system. Furthermore, programs can invoke these APIs in the programming language of their choice. C/C++, COBOL, PL/I and Assembler languages are fully supported and samples are provided for the first three languages mentioned.
How can you get your hands on this toolkit? Shipped in the base of z/OS V2R2, the functionality will also be rolled back to V2R1 in a staged fashion: a planned 1Q2015 availability for the z/OS JSON parser and a planned 3Q2015 availability for the HTTP enabler.
For more information on the toolkit, check out the z/OS V2R1.0 Introduction and Release Guide (GA32-0887-01), and see how easy it is going to be to make your application webified!
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