The System i Developer Road Atlas provides a comprehensive look at the diverse set of activities executed by System i developers in both customer and ISV development teams. It illustrates the steps for refreshing an RPG, COBOL, C, C++, and Java application and building the necessary extensions to help the ISV adopt and integrate the latest technologies. It also supplies the steps for including new development activities and integrating components written and/or running elsewhere.
The road atlas provides developers and analysts with an explanation and positioning of these technologies, including the tools and products available to assist, along with the education learning path to begin to grow their skills. There are various paths and packages which you can follow based on customer requirements and industry needs.
While the starting points for development activities might be different, the end goal of all paths through the Road Atlas is the same. Designing a Service Oriented Architecture for your business and populating it with application components from any of the pathways would achieve the ultimate support for an on demand business. The entire computing industry supports the concept of full application integration via SOA and System i shops are no different.
So, what are the starting points?
Pathway One: The top pathway through the Road Atlas starts with an existing application. (IBM WebSphere calls this starting point the Reuse Entry Point for SOA). This application is most likely written in traditional style, including all function in one piece of code. The goal of this pathway is to use one of the ReFacing technologies, available from IBM or one of the other tool vendors, to create a new user interface for the traditional application. Depending on the selected technology, these re-faced applications can participate in SOA. Some tools allow the consumption of web services and others allow both the consumption and the creation of web services.
Pathway Two: This pathway also begins with a traditional style application, but focuses on the structure of the application, making it more componentized based on business functions. This is a necessary step to have applications fully participate in an SOA environment. The recommended approach is to separate the user interface, data access, business logic and perhaps even printing into modules. This separation would allow an easier creation of business function modules which are then candidates for components to populate the SOA design.
Pathway Three: The creation of new application components written in various languages and using various tools is a key piece of work done by development shops today. New components can be written in such diverse languages as PHP and RPG, both perfectly suited to accomplish certain tasks of an application. Using SOA, these can be integrated and work in concert to achieve the business requirements of your business.
Pathway Four: This is new area for the Developer Roadmap and reflects the fact that various application components might be already in place - just running in a different language, perhaps on a different operating system, and perhaps even on a different platform. (IBM's WebSphere Division calls this the Connectivity Entry Point for SOA). Yet, the integration of these components allows architects to populate application designs quickly, as re-coding is not necessary. The industry is excited about the possibility to include components running in disparate languages, perhaps running on disparate platforms.
The new System i Developer Road Atlas can help you to extend your IBM System i applications to incorporate newer technologies such as PHP and Web technologies. For understanding the various options, there are detailed roadmaps available on each technology which can help you quickly come up to speed and extend the benefits of these on demand capabilities with your applications.
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