Peel interfaces from services

Kudos to the headline writer for InfoWorld's story about IBM's mainframe training program at colleges -- "Dear IT graduate, just one word -- mainframes."

Now, more legacy-to-SOA news: in a new press release, IBM announced that its WebSphere Portal is now supported on its zSeries mainframes and iSeries midrange servers. While sketchy on exact details of how the portal environment will mesh with the zOS or OS400 operating systems, Big Blue interjects the fact that the new WebSphere Portal includes "new features to further support customers' efforts to build service-oriented architectures (SOA)."

Gee, everything supports SOA these days, doesn't it? 

In all fairness, IBM has been doing a pretty good job bringing its Big Iron machines into the Web services/SOA era, and we've been saying all along in this blog that Web services and SOA will extend the life of mainframes/midranges well into the 2020s.

In this opinion posted at LooselyCoupled.com, Mike Gilbert of Micro Focus outlines how the fusion between old and new will likely happen. In a two-stage process, legacy applications should be converted into reusable core business services. "This means peeling away the original operator interface from the underlying 'services' in the applications that perform useful business functions. These core services are redeployed to their host platform in such a way that they can be invoked though some well chosen SOA-based middleware (for example Web services)."

Second, "these services are 'published' to the development teams building new client offerings, such as real time transaction systems, business reporting and approval processes, all using established international standards of communication... Smart IT organizations are achieving the transition in several evolutionary steps, selecting the most suitable candidate legacy applications first for conversion into core services to enable key development initiatives."

SOA is an abstraction layer that makes all infrastructure underneath irrelevant to all except operations and maintenance staff. We don't care if it's a mainframe or Windows delivering the service -- just deliver it.