Background: Focused expertise on Integration
HostBridge Technology was founded in 2000 with a focus on the development and delivery of software products that integrate existing and emerging technologies within large organizations. Since many large organizations rely heavily on IBM mainframes and applications, HostBridge has applied much of their creative energy on solving the difficult problems associated with the integration of these legacy systems with technologies that have recently emerged.
Having brought the first web-to-host (W2H) product to market in 1995, the founders of Hostbridge know first-hand the difficulties in developing host access solutions that meet the needs of large enterprises. Some of the features of their product include:
- Ease of use. CICS systems administrators can install HostBridge in less than an hour CICS application developers do not have to make any changes to the CICS applications.
- Standards-based. Web developers access CICS using industry standards like HTTP, XML, and SOAP.
- Scalable and flexible. Host-based software with not middle-tier screen scraping allows greater scalability and easier change management.
- Universal integration. Support for 3270, BMS, and COMMAREA programs means all your CICS applications can be invoked via HostBridge.
One problem with traditional integration is the proliferation of point-to-point data conversions that must change as new applications are integrated or data formats change. The problem gets worse when you add business partners into the integration mix.
HostBridge allows other applications to invoke mainframe CICS transactions as Web services. HostBridge accomplishes this with a two-step process. First, HostBridge changes the way CICS applications "speak." There are two basic typed of CICS applications: those
that are terminal-oriented and those that are not. The terminal-oriented applications can be broken down further based upon how they manage the presentation interface: they either use CICS' Basic Mapping Support (BMS) or they do not. Thus, there are three common categories of CICS applications and none of them communicate in a manner that is compatible with Web Services standards such as SOAP. This is where HostBridge comes into play. HostBridge web service-enables existing CICS applications without requiring modification to the existing application and without using techniques like "screen scraping".
Second, HostBridge must change the way application can invoke CICS transactions. HostBridge accomplishes this through its support for Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). As a result, a client, server or web-based application can invoke the services of an existing CICS application using standard SOAP messages and exchange data using XML.
"HostBridge has always been a strong proponent of industry standards" says Michael Wilson, Director of Product Marketing of HostBridge. "Adding support for a SOAP interface was a simple decision for us because our customers were asking for it."
The diagram above shows three web services: a Provider (HostBridge) that provides the web service, a Requester that uses a web service, and a Broker that finds Providers for Requesters. The following steps are required to find and use a web service. (Subsequent requests do not require steps 1-3.)
- Upload a WSDL specification to publish the HostBridge web service with a Broker.
- The Requester queries the Broker for a web service by name or category.
- The Broker selects a Provider and returns the Provider information to the Requester.
- The Requester uses the information from the Broker to format and send a SOAP message to the HostBridge.
- HostBridge returns a SOAP document to the Requester with the CICS data enclosed.
HostBridge is the perfect companion to enable CICS applications as web services. By supporting SOAP, XML, and HTTP, HostBridge makes it possible for applications to transparently invoke CICS transactions within a web services architecture and receive the resulting data as well-formed XML documents. For organizations that want to retain the value of their CICS applications, HostBridge and web services offer an ideal solution.
Challenge: Managing automotive insurance policy changes
Main Street America Group (MSA) is a regional property and casualty insurance company with more than $500 million in premium and is represented by 1,200 agents in 16 states along the Eastern Seaboard from Maine to Florida. MSA was established in 1923 as National Grange Mutual Insurance Company, and serves the needs of Main Street America businesses and individuals. MSA markets its products exclusively through the Independent Agency system. Its primary goal in developing web applications is to make it easy for its agents to do business with MSA. MSA provides web access to a CICS application for agents to enter policy change requests.
MSA's first Web application was for automobile policy change requests. It used a middle-tier, packaged application that scraped CICS application data off an emulated 3270 screen. While the resulting solution worked, the integration was inflexible.
"If we needed to add CICS screens or fields to the middle-tier application, making these changes was very time consuming," said Marty Haas, systems application manager at MSA. "This inflexibility caused us to think carefully about incorporating changes to the integration. We tried to understand how badly we needed the additional data, because making changes was not a trivial task."
Performance was another challenge. One of the goals of the project was to provide a policy retrieval time to the end user of between 5 and 10 seconds. To prevent users from experiencing delays during sign-on, MSA used a session pooling system with the middle-tier screen-scraping integration that kept CICS sign-ons open. However, even with this session pooling scheme in place, most users experienced policy retrieval response times between 8 and 15 seconds.
Solution: Less than 5 seconds for application authentication
When they replaced their screen-scraping solution, MSA developed the web-enablement for the homeowner policy change request application under IBM WebSphere in Java. They used HostBridge to allow Java Beans to request data from the homeowner policy change request application via HTTP, and have the data returned as an XML document. HostBridge does its processing on the mainframe using recommended IBM interfaces and techniques, eliminating the need for session pooling and screen scraping.
Now, agents login through the MSA website, are authenticated as valid users, and can access policy information using the insured's name or policy number. This request goes through the WebSphere application to HostBridge. HostBridge runs the specified CICS transaction and presents the output back to WebSphere as XML.
Figure 1. MSA architecture
Benefit: Greater flexibility in process management
MSA accomplished the web-enablement of its CICS-based homeowner policy change request application without having to make any changes to its CICS application. One benefit of using HostBridge is the separation of CICS business and presentation logic. This has allowed MSA to incorporate business logic in the middle-tier to process input more intelligently. "We're now relying on CICS only for data," continued Haas. "Business and presentation logic for this application is now managed in the middle-tier and on the client. We were able to implement a lot of 'business edits' to validate policy information on the client side so that the subsequent host processing is cleaner and ultimately faster to the insured. This technique removes work from our policy entry staff, because the agent is able
to enter information directly. If there is a problem with the way that data is entered, it is flagged in real-time and the agent is asked to correct it."
A second benefit in using HostBridge has been greater flexibility in making changes to what the agents see. "The fact that HostBridge runs inside of CICS makes it very easy if there is any kind of CICS screen change, or if an additional field needs to be pulled in," adds Haas. "Change is almost transparent. This makes it wonderful from a maintenance standpoint. We tend to forget that HostBridge is there!"
A third benefit, and perhaps the most significant, was the performance improvement MSA experienced using HostBridge with the homeowner policy change request application, compared to its experience with screen scraping. The need to use a session pooling scheme was eliminated with HostBridge.
"When we evaluated HostBridge, we liked the idea of not having to do the pooling," said Haas. "The way it hooked right in to CICS and WebSphere made it seem like a real good fit. Response time for policy retrieval on the homeowner policy change request application is now generally 5 seconds or less, which is amazing. The reaction from the agents has been very encouraging. They love web applications, and have commented they now want us to implement the automobile policy change request application the same way as homeowner's so they can get the same response time. The agents say they like our web site better than our larger competitor's. This is very important, because MSA uses only independent agents to market its policies, and they are comparing us to the competition. So far, we're looking very, very good."
For additional information on Hostbridge Technology, visit their website at www.hostbridge.com.
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