Using
Visual COBOL, you can choose from several methods provided to expose COBOL as Web services, and in some cases, deploy and run your Web
services on
Enterprise Server. In addition, you can also generate client applications to access your Web services.
- Interface Mapping Toolkit (IMTK)
- Starting with a native COBOL program, you can create Web services that use either the SOAP or JSON protocol by mapping a service
interface from which to generate Web service components, or by generating Web service components directly from WSDL or JSON. You can further run these Web services on
Enterprise Server and access them via a generated COBOL console client and, depending on the type of Web service, by additional client types.
See
Interface Mapping Toolkit (IMTK ) for details.
Note: Enterprise Server supports document/literal, RPC/encoded, and REST encoding styles.
- .NET COBOL
- Using
Visual COBOL, you can compile your COBOL applications to Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL), which uses the Microsoft .NET Framework
and includes Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) integration. You can then expose your WCF applications as Web services
with the COBOL application running as managed code.
This method requires OO COBOL or C# on the front end to invoke the Web service; however, you can then optionally call procedural
COBOL for the back end. See
Building Service-Oriented Applications with WCF and COBOL.
- Calling COBOL from Another Language
- You can call COBOL using any of a wide variety of other programming languages. Some of these languages have direct Web services
support through tooling and Application Server deployment.
CAUTION:
When developing a Web service using this method, be sure to include a failsafe to address the scenario in which the COBOL
program crashes or issues a STOP RUN when executed in the same process of an Application Server. Failure to address this scenario
introduces the risk of bringing down the Application Server.