Integrated Web Services Overview
Integrated Web Services for i enables integrated language environment (ILE) applications to play in the Web services and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) arena with very little effort, knowledge and resources. The convergence of Web service and IBM i technologies can help enterprises liberate these core business assets by making it easier to enrich, modernize, extend and reuse them well beyond their original scope of design.
Many businesses are seeing benefits in moving their information technology (IT) infrastructure to make greater use of standards as they roll out new applications and services, and to better exploit their existing infrastructure. In doing this, businesses have recognized that they need to become more flexible, allowing them to address new business opportunities more quickly by reusing more of their existing assets, including currently running business processes and applications.
By choosing to move to Web services and SOA, businesses can ensure that they design and build their IT infrastructure using an architectural style that supports service orientation. By linking together your business as a set of connected services, your IT infrastructure will be more flexible and responsive, allowing your business to be more flexible and responsive in turn.
The question for businesses is how to get there? Companies are hampered by the very technologies they rely on to run their businesses. Many of their core information IT applications written in ILE languages such as RPG and COBOL have been in service for years — even decades. Developed and optimized over a period of years, these applications are difficult to link to new technologies such as Web services and SOA — until now.
Getting started with Web services and SOA on i5/OS is easier than ever with the Integrated Web Services for i. The bottom line is that flexible businesses requires flexible IT, and the path to flexible IT is Web services and SOA.
| 
