Would it be possible to use web services from a Cobol program?

Question

We have some COBOL programs in our financial applications which need to interact with some of our backend systems. One of the available interfaces is through a web service. Can a program written in Cobol make requests to a web service?

Answer 1

Microfocus provide a tool called Enterprise Server which allows COBOL to interact with web services.

If you have a COBOL program A and another COBOL program B and A calls B via the interface section, the tool allows you to expose B's interface section as a web service.

For program A, you then generate a client proxy and A can now call B via a web service.

Of course, because B now has a web service any other type of program (command line, Windows application, Java, ASP etc.) can now also call it.

Answer 2

I've never used COBOL but from quick Google search it looks like it's possible.

This looks like it'll help, and talks about integrating webservices with cobol through c code.

Answer 3

What platform is this on? IBM's CICS supports webservices invokationnn from cobol program via EXEC CICS INVOKE.

Answer 4

ibm is now trying to implement a technology called embedded websphere with java. ibm belives this is the only way to give the life to mainframes.

Answer 5

I know I can write a WebService with Delphi and call a COBOL DLL or call a Delphi dll to comunicate with webservice.

Right now Im writing a webservice client, it will be a DLL, and Ill call from old COBOL systems.

Answer 6

If you have and are using CICS, it has built-in mechanisms for that. But assuming you can't use that for some reason, you can build an HTTP client using the IBM TCP/IP 'EZASOKET' modules.

I work for a company with a z/OS system running mostly COBOL, batch (JCL) and CICS. To call webservices, we wrote a module to implement HTTP 1.0 using TCP/IP. With modules

• EZASOKET
  • GETHOSTBYNAME
  • SOCKET
  • CONNECT
  • WRITE
  • FCNTL
  • READ
  • CLOSE
  • SELECTEX

supplementary modules:

• EZACIC04 translates EBCDIC to ASCII
• EZACIC05 translates ASCII to EBCDIC
• EZACIC06 convert character to bit mask
• EZACIC08 decode IP address

Since I wrote this for my company, I can't just give out the code. But for reference, it took me 3 days to write the module (plus a little debugging later), and that was with an example to start with that did a partial hacky way of doing it.

You will need to read through IBM's references to know how to use the EZA modules.

• http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/zos/v1r11/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.zos.r11.halc001/sampcs.htm