SOA Fundamentals

This article introduces the basic principles of Service Oriented Architecture and has many links to useful resources on the web that will give the reader a good start in this exciting area. For those wanting to learn in more depth then see my book recommendations at the end of the article.

Introduction
Enterprises are made up of a set of Business Processes. That is what makes a company tick, it's the day to day, week to week, year to year stuff that the corporation does to make a profit - provide a service, make something, sell something, receive money, issue invoices, bank money, pay staff and so on. Most of these processes can be broken down into more fundamental discrete building blocks known as services. SOA dictates that all services that can be automated be built in such a way that no calling client needs to worry about how it is implemented - the service is truly an abstract black box with a formal contract of engagement , the services can easily be reused and assembled into Business processes and the relationship between services and clients is one of limited dependency.

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William Hoffman
http://www.mainframe-upgrade.com/

The Wachovia SOA adventure

The 4th largest bank in the US, Wachovia, has started implementing a full on, end to end, IBM mainframe SOA with zAAP and Websphere. The results so far are good. Read more at this mainframe blog . Everyone is going to be watching this one very carefully – their plan takes them through to 2008 and their expectations are high – they hope to cut costs by a massive 40%
Read the Internetnews article

Wachovia are also being innovative in their use of bonus payments to developers who adopt enthusiastically the new skillsets and get involved in the forging the new SOA solutions. Read more on this at aspnews

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William Hoffman
http://www.mainframe-upgrade.com/

The Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2006

I heartily recommend the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2006 - it is in pdf format and free. It runs this year to 124 pages and is a must read for mainframe professionals. Contents include articles on the years trends including of course SOA and Virtualisation. There is a comprehensive list of vendors, top mainframe links and an excellent mainframe glossary as well as the user survey results and hardware tables. Definitely worth a look.

William Hoffman
http://www.mainframe-upgrade.com/

UK Mainframe Contractor Rates

For those of you interested in working in the UK at Mainframe sites the following links may be useful to get an idea of the kind of rate you are likely to get -

To get an idea of what UK mainframe contractors are being paid go to http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/contracts/uk/mainframe.do - there is also a tab at the top for permanent mainframe jobs. This is very useful stuff with comparisons and regional splits.

MQseries rates are at http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/contracts/uk/mqseries.do

For a good picture of Irish IT contractor rates (including Mainframe) go to http://www.finfacts.com/Private/isl/it.htm

William Hoffman - Mainframe-Upgrade.Com

COBOL thoughts

About 3/4 of all Enterprise data is processed by COBOL applications.

Have you moved yet to the consolidated run-time environment LE (Language Environment), which hikes up performance, connectivity and functionality for applications written in COBOL (and PL/1, FORTRAN, Assembler and C) and is now a prerequisite for z/OS. If the answer is no then you are a bit behind the times and if you want some help then one company worth a look at is Blue Pheonix who have COBOL/LE-Enabler.

Recommended: Mainframe COBOL programing book Murach's Mainframe COBOL. Focuses on IBM Mainframe COBOL - well structured, excellent manual. Also worth a read is an article by Mike Murach on The Future of COBOL

I recently re-read an interesting 2003 article at eweek - Peter Coffee's Is COBOL the 18-Wheeler of the Web? with some statistics of note: 15% of new applications are COBOL , "The most highly paid programmers in the next ten years are going to be COBOL programmers who know the Internet" (GIGA). I'm not sure this entirely fits in with todays SOA world - I'd be interested in views on this.

More COBOL musings soon

WH May 2006