Azure Thoughts, EAI Challenges

M icrosoft 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...

Last year I have done an integration project for slaughterhouse in Holland. This slaughterhouse had a logistic program running on AS/400 with a DB2 database. I was asked to extract data out of the database concerning planning of vehicle’s to arrive at the slaughterhouse with livestock to be slaughtered. This data was displayed (consumed) by an ASP.NET application. When vehicles arrived this was registered by operators using the ASP.NET app. During the slaughter process earmarks on livestock was used to provide more data like weight, meat quality and so on about the animal. The app had an SQL Server 2000 database as backend. All this data had to be put back into DB2 database. An integration solution was wanted in this scenario, where the slaughterhouse wanted to use BizTalk to get planning data out of the database each night and all data gathered during the day back in DB2. The planning data in DB2 had to be extracted through a sequence of queries on different tables in a certain order....