From time to time I like to tell, to express (or even to brag about) what keeps our minds busy. Sometimes it's even useful, and you unexpectedly discover, you are on the edge of community interests, other time you are outsider.

So, what are we doing now? Well, already several years we are working in Multiconn. One of goals of our company is to help to expose mainframe functionality. Many different solutions of this task are available, and even Multiconn provides several different approaches. Now go right to our business - web service as delegate of mainframe.

To be honest, I think mainframes are legacy monsters, dinosaurs. I realize, it's only a bad perspective, but the first experience is often very strong. For us as developers mainframe is a source of data in different formats (sure formats are legacy also): COBOL records, terminal messages, and so on. Our idea is to allow to mainframe to rest in peace and to gracefully consume its data. Combining consumed data in xml form and operation bindings that describe mainframe's application flow, we arrive to a view of mainframe application as a web service.

To achieve this goal we have worked up extension to xml schema that allows mapping schema elements to a data. It should be pointed, it's perfectly legal to extend xml schema. One way to extend it, is to use elements in custom namespace in appInfo element.

The following was to create importer of schema with our extensions. It's somehow similar to xsd.exe tool. Our tool generates classes with annotations XmlXxxAttribute for xml serialization and LayoutXxxAttribute (this is our custom attributes) for instance serializing and deserializing to and from a mainframe data.

The next stage was to create data serializer. This is a counterpart to XmlSerializer. It inspects class meta-data and creates plan for serialization and deserialization.

On the next stage we have worked up wsdl schema bindings for our technology.

After that we have created tool to import wsdl (similar to wsdl.exe) that generates web service which passes input messages to communication layer that serializes and forwards data to mainframe, accepts and deserializes response and returns it to the web service, which in its turn returns result to a client.

The next was communication layer that interacts with mainframe. This layer consists of abstract (general) sublayer and specializations which support different patterns of communications.

As result we have web service implemented in .NET. This web service represents some mainframe's application.

There are plans to generate similar web services in the Java.