Now a days many applications are using web design to their front end systems. These look so user-friendly. A layman user can enter data without much harder.
Legacy systems like mainframes, CICS supports UI facility. Now the questions is how CICS sends/receives data from web services.
I got an excellent description from IBM info centre:
“CICS applications can act in the role of both service provider and service requester, where the services are defined using Web Services Description Language (WSDL).
The support for Web services includes the CICS Web services assistant, a batch utility which can help you to:
- transform an existing CICS application into a Web service
- and enable a CICS application to use a Web service provided by an external provider.
The assistant can create a WSDL document from a simple language structure, or a language structure from an existing WSDL document, and supports COBOL, C/C++, and PL/I.
It also generates information used to enable automatic run time conversion of the SOAP messages to containers and COMMAREAs, and vice versa.” Read here for more info.
Srinimf 