SOARCHITECT
FOR WEB SERVICES
soarchitect creates web services from your existing applications.
- Ease of use – no knowledge of generated WSDL or XML required
- Increased reuse from existing IT investments
- Easier integration with external business partners’ applications
- Increased flexibility and agility
- Reduced development time and costs
soarchitect enables any functionality defined or accessed using looksoftware’s ‘Dynamic Environment’ to be accessed as a web service. Use soarchitect, together with newlook and centric to reuse your existing applications and extend and integrate them to deliver new solutions as composite applications.
The business case for Service Oriented Architecture
Gartner estimates that by 2010, 80% of midrange businesses will be deploying SOA to enable them to benefit from compelling business advantages including:
- Improved business agility
- Reduced software development costs
- More efficient, streamlined, business processes
- Simpler application integration
By programmatically accessing existing applications, including midrange systems written in RPG or Cobol, reusable modules can be created without changing the underlying application code. These reusable modules, or services, can be easily accessed by other applications being utilized within the business or indeed by external applications. They can act as building blocks in the delivery of new solutions.
SOARCHITECT – CASE STUDY EXAMPLE
‘Dynamic Environment’ – a single integrated environment for modernizing existing IT assets and delivering the benefits of composite applications. Dynamic access to the presentation, application and database layers, provides you with the flexibility to define your service modules to include the required mix of new and existing functionality.
VicRoads cut its development costs, improved agility and delivered a 40% productivity gain to their Call Centre in 6 months using soarchitect. By adopting a practical, ROI driven approach to web services, VicRoads has been able to take a significant step towards becoming a Service Oriented Organization (SOA)
soarchitect enables any functionality defined or accessed using looksoftware’s ‘Dynamic Environment’ to be accessed as a web service. Use soarchitect, together with newlook and centric to reuse your existing applications and extend and integrate them to deliver new solutions as composite applications.
Background
- Existing RPG System i5 and Cobol System z applications
- Robust, reliable applications that meet core business needs
Problem
- Call centre costs increasing due to complexity of navigating multiple non-integrated applications
- Modernizing back-end applications to improve flexibility, agility and integration with new technologies
The Steps to rapid ROI from the first project
- VicRoads identified call centre costs could be reduced by integrating host applications to streamline call centre business processes
- Identified that cost, risk and time frames associated with invasive modernization were not acceptable
- Common Business Process defined, including the definition of the key services or chunks of business function required to support the revised call centre process
- soarchitect was used to expose the back-end functionality as web services
- newlook was used to define a smart client frontend which seamlessly connected to the back-end applications via the new web service interfaces
- Productivity gains measured at 40% for typical transactions and 50% for complex transactions
- The ‘new’ solution delivered a superior business service through a new channel – the smart client
The next project will deliver even more reuse!
- The standardised call centre process meant some calls could be handled by Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems, bypassing the need for operator intervention
- The IVR system interfaced directly with the web services created in the first project, enabling simple calls to be handled without operator involvement
- The ‘new’ solution delivered a new business service through a new channel – Interactive Voice Response, composed almost entirely of existing functionality and required no changes to host applications
- A third project, again composed primarily of the same web services delivered with the first project, will be delivered using an XML document channel, allowing batches of transactions to be processed together
How can soarchitect facilitate application integration?
- By using Transaction Recorder to quickly and easily create web services
- By allowing external business partners access to your applications via customized, secure web services
- By building smart client UIs and highly productive solutions for information workers
- By defining simple service interfaces for modules that may span multiple applications and platforms
- By integrating your existing applications with MS Office using web services to provide insulation against changing applications and platforms
soarchitect developer – an integrated module of the looksoftware ‘Dynamic Environment’
soarchitect is a developer component of the looksoftware
soarchitect feature summary – The simplicity of newlook and the power of web services…
- Encapsulate new or existing functionality as open standards based web services
- Transaction recorder provides ‘drag and drop’ creation of web services from existing i5 5250 applications
- Transaction recorder creates reusable transactions from i5 5250 applications for offline support
- lookdirect enables 5250 applications to be supported by i5 Standard Edition
- Web services browser generates high level services definition from low level WSDL and web services calls in desired scripting language
- Generates all web services code, including WSDL, for any functionality supported by looksoftware’s ‘Dynamic Environment’ including:
– i5 5250 applications – any i5 program,
including RPG, Cobol and Java
– DB2 access
– SQL Server, Oracle & Access etc
– i5 commands