SOLA Features

SOLA - A Single Comprehensive Solution

SOLA is a unique standards based single solution that bridges the gap between mainframe applications and the distributed world, thereby leveraging decades of investment in existing applications. SOLA provides proven, quick, efficient and cost effective application integration by publishing legacy applications as Web Services. This is accomplished without any additional hardware, middleware, software, coding or cross platform skills training. SOLA’s powerful toolset -- and Web Services -- dramatically reduce application development cost and time to market.

SOLA has several significant advantages over competitive products. Taken together these features provide lower cost and greater productivity.

• Easy to use and deploy – “one click” creation of web-services.
  
  
• Very high performance, production proven
  
  
• Comprehensive monitoring and error logging for easy problem diagnosis and resolution
  
  
• Integrated testing and debugging tools
  
  
• Services created from the “Inside Out” – the person who knows the program the best – creates the services
  
  
• Global Dictionary that allows for the automatic translation of COBOL field names without affecting the source program.
  
  
• Brower based development environment
  
  
• Security based on WS-Security and WS-Policy
  
  
• UDDI 3.0 Registry/Directory
  
  
• Support for Architectural Standards
  
  
• Standards Based
  
  
• Customization APIs
  
  
• Batch Capabilities
  
  
• Orchestration using BPEL (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services)
  
  
• Publishes legacy applications as Web Services, allowing them to easily integrate with .Net, J2EE or any other development environment.
  
  
• Can create web services from Commarea programs, 3270 transactions, stored procedures, Adhoc SQL, Callable APIs and VSAM Access.
  
  
• Inbound and outbound web services support (the mainframe can act as a web services server or a web services client)
  
  
• Global dictionary, WSDL first development and powerful WSDL customization features for unparalleled flexibility and support for architectural standards.
  
  
• WC3-compliant Assembler XML parser for superior performance and low parsing costs.
  
  
• Central UDDI directory for easy discovery and Enterprise-wide reuse.
  
  
• Single sign-in using LDAP or SAML
  
  
• Outbound services support for SSL and proxy
  
  
• Supports both http and MQ transport layers
  
  
• CICS 3.1 Integration – If required, SOLA can be integrated directly into the CICS 3.1 pipeline.
  
  

Features

• Services created from the “Inside Out”
  All competitive products create services from existing mainframe programs, but only SOLA creates services from the “inside out”. With SOLA the mainframe programmer – the person who knows the program the best – creates the services. Competitive approaches expect the distributed programmer – the person who knows the program the least (if at all) to create services from the “outside in”.
  
  
• Global Dictionary
  One of SOLA’s many features is an integrated global dictionary that allows for the automatic translation of COBOL field names without affecting the source program. The SOLA dictionary centralizes translation services, therefore minimizing duplication of effort for developers.
  
  
• Brower based development environment
  With SOLA there’s no workstation software to install – the entire SOLA development toolset runs in a browser. This is a huge advantage – in our experience the majority of developers don’t have workstations that are powerful enough to run the “previous generation” development toolsets provided by competitors.
  
  
• Security based on WS-Security and WS-Policy
  SOLA security is based on WS-Security and WS-Policy standards and implemented on the mainframe. By implementing WS standards on the mainframe, SOLA provides efficient and flexible security, obviating the need for a middle tier security agent.
  
  
• WSDL-First Development
  A lot of mainframe shops that are adopting SOA develop WSDL that complies with their architecture standards before creating web services. SOLA allows developers to create services that comply with an existing WSDL as well as create services from scratch that generate their own definitions.
  
  
• UDDI Directory
  All services created by SOLA are automatically published to an external UDDI 3.0 registry, which ensures that services exposed by SOLA are visible and useable within the enterprise.
  
  
• Support for Architectural Standards
  Using the combination of the SOLA dictionary, WSDL-first development and powerful WSDL customization features, SOLA can publish web services that comply with any and all possible architectural standards.
  
  
• Standards Based
  SOLA is a standards based solution, allowing interoperability across platforms, operating systems and programming languages. Being standards based also allows SOLA to expand and evolve without cumbersome enterprise-wide revisions, giving it unparalleled reusability and growth potential.
  
  
• Customization APIs
  SOLA provides customization APIs that allow customers to add capabilities beyond the product’s existing feature set. These APIs allow the user access to SOLA processing at various points in the SOAP stack so that processing can be manipulated by user specific application code. These APIs also support custom security exits. Custom APIs can be defined at the installation level or at the individual method level.
  
  
• Batch Capabilities
  SOLA provides a number of significant features that are available to the z/OS batch programmer. Firstly, the SOLA DOM parser and API provide the batch programmer with methods to easily and inexpensively consume and create XML documents. Secondly, the SOLA outbound support is also available to the batch programmer, making it simple for a batch program to consume an outbound web service.
  
  
• Orchestration
  SOLA provides orchestration using BPEL (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services). BPEL is an XML based standard for designing, defining, implementing, and deploying composite web services, including business logic, sequencing, exception handling and process decomposition. BPEL is supported by the SOLA run-time engine.
  
  

• SOLA in the Enterprise SOA
• Article: Running a SOAP stack on the mainframe
• Request a SOLA Demo
• SOLA Whitepaper
• Back to SOLA Overview

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SOA Software is the leading provider of Integrated SOA Governance. It is the largest specialist vendor of SOA solutions and the only company that offers a complete SOA infrastructure solution that can govern Web Services that reside on all major platforms.