SOA and Host Systems

Microsoft recently released a white paper about leveraging value of host systems with real world SOA. The paper can be downloaded here. We from Microsoft Unit at Inter Access are now doing some researched based on this paper. We are trying for instance to call RPG code on AS/400. In a previous posts I mentioned I have been able to extract data from DB2 on AS/400, so connecting to AS/400 was easy. Same counts for connecting to a DB2 database. My colleague Hugo has written a nice tool to view data inside DB2 that helps to indentify tables, colums and so on.















I must say he has done a nice job with only a few lines of code:

MsDb2Connection con = new MsDb2Connection(textBox1.Text);
MsDb2Command command = new MsDb2Command(textBox2.Text, con); MsDb2DataAdapter adapter = new MsDb2DataAdapter(command);
MsDb2Transaction tran = null;
DataSet ds = new DataSet();
try
{
con.Open();
tran = con.BeginTransaction(IsolationLevel.ReadCommitted);
command.Transaction = tran;
adapter.Fill(ds);
dataGridView1.DataSource = ds.Tables[0];
textBox3.Text = string.Format("Records selected: {0}", ds.Tables[0].Rows.Count.ToString());
tran.Commit();
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
textBox3.Text = string.Format("Exception: " + ex.Source + " Message: " + ex.Message);
tran.Rollback();
}
finally
{
command.Dispose();
tran.Dispose();
adapter.Dispose();
con.Close();
con.Dispose();
}

By using Microsofts Host Integration Server one can connect to back-end systems like AS/400. With this product from Microsoft functionality, data that resides on legacy systems can be exposed to outside world through services. So these systems can be still usefull inside an organisation and through services made available. Hence services can expose functionality/data from these systems a SOA is perfect. SOA provides capabilities to legacy systems to interact more with modern business process management and workflow tools. From Microsoft view this will be BizTalk Server and Workflow Foundation. More findings about our research will be posted later on.

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