MuleSoftwebinar with MDI and LegStar

MuleSoft is putting together a Webinar on wednesday July 14th which features Mule ESB + MDI + LegStar. You can join the webinar here.

It tells a very compelling story where you want to web enable a CICS/COBOL program but would like a very different message structure than the original COBOL program input and output.

In this scenario LegStar does the COBOL parsing and mainframe transport while MDI takes over the transformation. The result is a Web Service with a nice interface deployed in Mule ESB. MDI really adds value here in that it hides the ugly COBOL structure and expose a set of friendly java classes instead.

COBOL structures, which typically describe CICS commareas, are often complex and convoluted due to the limitation of COBOL but also the need to reduce external calls and therefore cramming as much data as possible in a single commarea.

Exposing such complex structures as web services results in WSDL that is quite difficult to manipulate. MDI can be used to visually map these complex structures with simpler java classes and hence expose a nicer web service.