In this session we’ll take a look at the origin of how business critical applications communicated with
each other to successfully satisfy their objectives. We will briefly discuss heavy transaction
applications, such as those running for banks, insurance companies and medical businesses –
these run on the Main Frame (MF). Sharing this data with other MF applications is done via simple
API processing. Since the MF is a vessel that creates and contains such critical data – it can now share that data with other platform applications via REST APIs. We will see the evolution of this sharing process, how it
can be absorbed and redisplayed in a very user friendly and modern presentation with open source
tools and the internet/web browser. This approach is the precursor to AI systems that produce
similar, but “automated” methods. The session will use an MF database supporting business applications, reflecting its performance via open source tools and web browser, thus assisting a database administrator to monitor and analyze performance for peak business transaction flows. Our example will be based on the Zowe API for IDMS, but the techniques are general and can be applied to any product and/or database that exposes performance metrics through a REST API.
Thomas Halinski has been a Mainframe Value Manager, a Technical Services Consultant and an Assistant Project Manager for Broadcom, Inc. for the past several years. He supports the Sales Team for the Mainframe Software Division’s primary solutions and plays a valuable role in promoting and deploying open source tools for the modernization of the mainframe arena. For the prior 40+ years, he has been a Business Applications Consultant for various industries performing Enterprise Application Design, program design, development, and coding. He specializes in MVS performance tuning, with an emphasis in Db2. He has written several papers, has presented them internationally and has been published in the IDUG Solutions Journal. He has held the Subject Area Chair – z/Series position for the Computer Management Group’s (CMG) National Conference for 7 years and was also an Assistant Project Manager for SHARE – EWCP for 5 years. He has received the distinction of becoming an IBM Champion for 2023, 2024 & 2025 and is on the Computer Measurement Group’s (CMG) Board of Directors for 2024 & 2025.
