by Ed Goodman » Thu Feb 02, 2012 9:07 pm
You would first need to find out which of the many many ways of doing this your site has decided to support. On the mainframe side, they may have implemented JDBC connectors, or maybe a DataBean interface, or maybe an ODBC-type interface. Like you said, there are a lot of ways to do it.
However, if you pick a different one than the folks running them mainframe picked, you won't get connected.
Ask around at your shop and find out what other mainframe apps are sending data to java apps, then do whatever they did. The only thing I can tell you with any certainty is that you aren't going to like it. No matter what they used, you're going to think they should have used something else.
Also, don't confuse the connection layers with the tools that work on them. We just went through that this week. I was hearing things like "this is how this system passes data" when if fact, it was how the WebSphere wizard works. Once you looked at the code the wizard generated, you could see what was really happening.