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Companies like Microsoft, BEA, Sun Microsystems, IONA, SAP, Sonic Software, Nokia, IBM, Nortel, Adobe, webMethods, etc. invest lots of resources to these standards bodies (WS-Policy Participants) Some of the people are in several working groups and basically have built a career just working on standards,. And it is certainly not a cushy number. These people work hard on some very tedious material! It can do you head in!

I am an infant in this world. Though I have lots of enterprise computing experience and interoperability experience I feel like a complete novice. I'm fortunate to have landed with a very civil bunch who are gracious at bringing me up to speed.

Now there are many times that this sort of working group activity will do my head in. Bickering over the semantics of a word or the usage of a word or the absence of a word is not how I'd like to spend my day. But I've come to appreciate what can happen when ideas and standards are ambiguous. Chaos can ensue and perfectly good initiatives can die.

I'm hoping to pull post an article giving an overview of WS-Policy. Stay posted.

This week the WG had a face-to-face in Bellevue, Washington. I finally got to meet the people I've been talking to on conference calls every week for the last few months. We got to find out a little more about each other - not just our views on WS-Policy. Bellevue/Seattle was beautiful when I arrived but turned ugly from Wednesday. It was wet like Ireland. We did have a wonderful meal at the Seastar restaurant. I'd recommend it.

Taking an existing loan approval application written in COBOL and residing in the CICS region in Dublin, we demonstrated how we could generate WSDL from the COBOL copybook. ALSB was running on an IONA Linux box in Waltham. We deployed this service as a SOAP/HTTP based Web service with Artix z/OS. Then we took ALSB and read in the WSDL and made it part of a simple routing decision - routing to an existing loan approval bean in the J2EE container for certain loan requests and to the CICS COBOL loan approval for other loan requests (based on the interest rate request). There was some transformation mapping required because the message schemas were a little different. This transformation was configured in the ALSB console.

We then ran a simple Java client that invoked on the Web service exposed by ALSB and watched as different requests were routed to different loan approval applications. Cool! We were all impressed.

The real value was demonstrated next. We decided to turn on some security on the mainframe. So we required SSL and RACF authentication. We set this up using Artix z/OS and transferred the SSL certification to ALSB (Artix would manage the RACF problem - propagating the security credentials from the SOAP headers into something that RACF would understand and then authenticate against!) Again it worked wonderfully. ALSB successfully added the security credentials to the SOAP message on the mainframe bound messages and encrypted. Artix z/OS then decrypted and authenticated against RACF and forwarded the loan approval request to the COBOL program. This really was slick.

I was on site doing going through the process but the real preparation work was performed by Alan Brown on the z/OS machine and Stan Lewis with the ALSB work. A big thanks to them!

If your a doing lots of Weblogic J2EE based development but need to reuse assets on IBM z/OS machines (CICS or IMS btw) then this is a great solution. (You should also look at Artix for other non-J2EE end-points too).

Here is the Artix z/OS documentation. For some reason the technical white paper requires a logon but this is freely available.