This article refers to JCA, the Java Connector Architecture, not the Java Cryptography Architecture.
When we considered J2EE several years ago as a potential target for mainframe integration, I was horrified and decided not to pursue that route. This has proven the right choice and the J2EE reputation was so bad that the name was later changed to Java EE.
The idea that overly complex technologies provide great opportunities to sell services and consulting is not new. Some very large companies made a fortune this way. Some of these same companies were very active during the J2EE specifications...
Of course J2EE completely failed to become the universal web engine it was meant to be, but it made it to most large Entreprise Systems. Or at least part of the technology was adopted by large IT departements and some of the complexity alleviated thanks to frameworks like Spring.
So the reality today is that most companies still using mainframes also use Java EE.
Another interesting development concerns the latest Java EE specifications (5 and 6). I don't know if the J2EE designers were humbled by their past failures but I have to say they did a much better job this time. Today, the technology is almost usable without Spring. For instance, you can inject a JNDI resource with a single annotation which would have taken about 10 lines of Java code previously. If you want to learn more about the latest Java EE, I recommend reading Antonio Goncalves's blog.
So with Java EE specs getting better and almost all mainframe shops using it, I thought it was time for LegStar to start supporting Java EE containers. The result is part of a series of extensions to LegStar that I am working on.
The first deliverable is a JCA Resource Adapter that uses CICS Sockets as its underlying connectivity.
It is conformant to the JCA 1.0 specifications but does not implement some of the CCI chapter (which is optional anyway). In practice we do not support CCI Records which are awkward indexed or mapped objects. In my view, Records are not suitable to represent COBOL structures. With the LegStar JCA connector, Instead of Records, you simply use regular LegStar Transformers.
I am convinced that separating Resource Adapter fonctionalities (Connection pooling, Transactions and Security) from Transformation is a much better approach than what most JCA connectors available on the market do. For one thing, you can reuse the Transformers outside Java EE which is good because, even if Java EE is largely used by mainframe shops, they also use many other java based technologies (ESBs, ETLs, ...).
I intend to support the other LegStar transports (HTTP, WebSphere MQ) in the future as well as some other transports I have in mind. There will be a different JCA Resource Adapter for each transport.
One thing you might notice is that the licence has changed for these extensions. While the core LegStar project remains LGPL for the time being, the extensions use the more restrictive GPL. LGPL is often used when OSS projects start and need to get the wider acceptance possible, while GPL is for more mature OSS projects. LegStar is 7 years old now and if you look at what Google has to say about open source mainframe integration:
You will agree with me that it has gained sufficient traction to become part of the higher class GPL projects out there.
This is all thanks to you of course since I haven't devised a scheme to get Google to better rank my sites and never paid Google a dime either :-).
