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Implementing Service Oriented Architecture Solutions (SOA)

Service Oriented Architecture is an architectural style for creating and using business processes, packaged as services, throughout their lifecycle.

This approach to application design is not fundamentally new and the term SOA is the latest nomenclature to describe agile systems. Market forces continually drive businesses towards this approach mainly for the following reasons:

  • New systems continue to become more complex
  • End-users always have new expectations and requirements
  • Western labor costs are high
  • Technology directions are fluid
  • Tight coupling is strangling agility
  • Maintenance is crushing innovation

The LANSA software development platform is ready for SOA. LANSA has been designed to be technology neutral, requiring only a single skill set in a single tool to generate any type of application. Meta data is centralized using the LANSA Repository and interoperability is guaranteed using common industry standards. With LANSA you can easily expose functions as Web services within a Service Oriented Architecture environment.

Web Services

In an SOA environment, Web Services can form a major part of the architecture as the ‘callable object’ to execute a given business process or transaction as part of a larger application. Web services are typically ‘published’ by one system and ‘consumed’ by others.

The transition to SOA using the LANSA platform can be represented as follows:

Transition to SOA diagram

Customers who have implemented a SOA and Web Services using LANSA



Western Financial Group
Western Financial Group's division formally known as Hayhurst Elias Dudek Inc. (HED), specialized in providing unique and cost-effective insurance and risk management solutions for independent businesses since 1982. HED has a mixture of LANSA and .NET systems and Web sites, as well as legacy RPG applications, running on multiple Windows and System i servers. HED uses LANSA Web services and a Visual LANSA Framework built CRM system to integrate these heterogeneous solutions and move towards an SOA environment.
Read the HED Case Study
Hayhurst Elias Dudek Inc. (“HED”) is part of the Western Financial Group ("WES") since 2009 and continues to use LANSA to develop and enhance its IT systems.



Terminix
The Terminix International Company, headquartered in Memphis, Tennessee USA is part of the ServiceMaster family of brands and the largest termite and pest control company in the world, safeguarding over three million homes and businesses. Terminix replaced a COBOL mainframe system and hundreds of standalone UNIX systems at its branches with a central LANSA-based application running on a single 595 iSeries. The system, used by 12,000 employees at over 400 locations and 5,500 service specialists on the road with hand-held devices, also interacts with an increasing number of third-party systems using LANSA Integrator and Web Services.
Read the Terminix Case Study




E.P. Barrus
E. P. Barrus Ltd, located in the U.K., designs and manufactures engines and distributes a diverse range of products including MTD lawn and garden machinery, moto-roma scooters and motorcycles, Mercury, Mariner and Yanmar marine and industrial engines. Barrus uses LANSA Integrator to exchange EDI messages with its trading partners including B&Q, the largest do-it-yourself chain in Europe and the third largest in the world. Barrus also uses LANSA Integrator on its dealer Web site to utilize Web Services from Epitomy, a company specializing in exploding diagrams, so dealers can search for parts without knowing the part number. LANSA Integrator Web services link to Epitomy’s Web site, where dealers dissect engine diagrams to select the part they need. A SOAP message is then sent back to Barrus’ Web site and the dealer can complete the order.
Read the E.P. Barrus Case Study

LANSA solutions for Service Oriented Architecture and Web services

LANSA Integrator takes the complexity out of implementing Web services for a LANSA or traditional 3GL developer and  comes with a range of services that handle common integration tasks such as processing XML, transporting data over common protocols such as FTP, HTTP or by e-mail and for creating and reading common file types such as PDF, ZIP, CSV and Excel workbooks.

Visual LANSA is the only Integrated Development Environment (IDE) you will ever need. You can easily add functionality to your existing core applications or build new innovative applications. Visual LANSA is a development tool tightly focused on just one thing – rapidly creating high quality commercial applications. But it is not simply a more productive IDE, Visual LANSA’s platform independent Object Repository and high-level business-focused language lets you develop 5250, Web and Windows rich client programs – from a single code base.

RAMP from LANSA – the Rapid Application Modernization Process – is the fastest and most certain way to modernize and web-enable your existing System i applications. RAMP is a single integrated solution that addresses both your immediate and strategic modernization requirements. What's unique about RAMP is it's a "reengineering" product that lets you rapidly consolidate your applications into a graphic application framework and then incrementally replace your legacy programs with new reengineered components – in a timeframe that makes sense to your organization.