IMS Blog: IMS Java at NRB to reinforce and modernize core business applications

Providing IMS Java expertise for all our outsourced European IMS clients and prospects

Overview

NRB provides IT mainframe services for more than 20 clients hosted on their IBM z16 systems in Belgium or operated remotely by NRB’s mainframe teams in Belgium and France.

It started with outsourcing services, later adding Mainframe Enhanced services to support innovation and modernization in-place, as well as Application Management Services mainly for PL/I clients. We also developed some application discovery expertise to work with our customers on partial stack transition.

Naturally, some of our clients use IMS as their preferred transaction manager. This article will explain how NRB reinforced and modernized their customers’ core business applications using Java.

The IMS Java Business Value

As legacy skills become harder to find and workloads continue to grow, organizations are looking for cost effective ways to modernize their existing platforms. They all know that complete re-plaforming projects are long-term, costly and risky.

The approach NRB proposes is to understand the application landscape and propose targeted extensions written in Java. Our focus is not on converting PL/I or COBOL code to Java, but rather on delivering business value.

In this article, we focus mainly on Java, one of the key solutions we have been using to modernize applications in parallel with bidirectional API implementation, business rules externalization, application event management and data change event capture.

For one of our main customers, NRB started early by adopting a Java-based strategy to accelerate innovation, to tap into a broader talent pool, and to modernize business applications at their own pace — all while protecting and enhancing the value of their IMS investment by leveraging the following strategies:

Extension of existing application assets

NRB has been working closely with IMS and PL/I labs to make sure they were planning to provide PL/I and Java interoperability support in the near future after COBOL interoperability was made available. It was clearly seen as a prerequisite to invest in IMS Java.

This effort took some time, and in 2022 we started to see some external publications about this subject:

§  IBM technote from IBM Support: Java interoperability with PL/I – Link

• Document: Writing IMS Applications Using PL/I and Java interoperability | JOSEPH LEAMON | Jul 13, 2022 – Link
• Scenario 1 demonstrates how a PL/I application that runs in a Message Processing Region (MPR) can integrate calls to Java. The concepts in this scenario also apply to IFP and BMP applications.
• Scenario 2 demonstrates how a Java application that runs in a JMP region can integrate calls to PL/I. The concepts in this scenario also apply to JBP applications.

We were ready to sell the solution to NRB and customer decision makers so we built our Java on z/OS point of view in early 2023:

The business value of using Java in IMS applications is obvious:

Extend business value of IMS legacy applications while building new ones

•          Improve integration of old and new components thanks to COBOL and PL/1 Java bidirectional interoperability
•          No disruption to existing IT operation processes around security, performance and workload management

Allow rapid application development

•         Reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and Total Time to Value (TTV)
•          Leverage existing marketplace and industry standards

Leverage new and abundant skills in the marketplace

•          Reduce learning curve for developers
•          Potentially hiding IMS programming in a framework ;)

Benefit from continuous evolution of Java on z/OS

• Expanded functionality and security
• Enhanced performance achievements      
• Potential cost reduction for zIIP eligible workload

Thanks to IMS Java and PL/I–Java interoperability, NRB is able to modernize existing applications without disruption, implementing Java-based services alongside PL/I services; sometimes calling Java from PL/I in MPP regions, and sometimes calling PL/I from Java to reuse existing data services for IMS databases.

Simplification of Java coding thanks to our framework

NRB started building an IMS Java based framework in addition to the already existing PL/I framework, built developed over many years to standardize and accelerate application programming while delivering embedded services like error management, audit, apps monitoring and logging.

The IMS Java solution should:

§  Enable the development of Java applications on the IBM Z platform with IMS Transaction Management for transactional applications and batch workloads

§  Support our “to be” architecture patterns and architectural concepts based on services

§  Enable interoperability between different languages (mainly PL/I and COBOL)

§  Benefit from existing transactionality and security on the platform

§  Reduce run costs and MSU consumption through the usage of zIIP type processors

§  Be attractive to developers by minimizing constraints 

§  Increase development speed and reduce time to market

§  Deliver adequate performance

Our IMS Java framework provides an abstraction layer and additional services for all aspects as:

·         Applicative context initialization

·         Services and operations metadata management

·         Access to Middleware: IMS TM, CICS, MQ

·         Java Native Interface (JNI) support for interoperability

·         ODM ruleset execution

·         Error handling

·         Application logging and monitoring supported by OpenTelemetry and Grafana integration for modern observability

·         Future enhancements including OSGI support

New DevSecOps implementation to be future ready

We have also established an Enterprise Software Factory incorporating a Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline modernized for Java assets.

Conclusion

Our mission was to simplify and accelerate the development of Java Applications on the IBM Z Platform through the implementation of a Service Oriented Application Development Framework and its associated tooling.

Our vision was to reinforce and modernize our customers’ core business applications with a special focus on openness and integration, business and IT agility, quality, cost, and risk optimization.   

We wanted to tackle the human resource challenge by reducing dependence on scarce PL/I and COBOL expertise, while leveraging the availability of skilled Java developers.

Our solution’s strength lies in fully leveraging the capabilities of the mainframe environment. By running Java applications on the continuously modernized IBM Z and NRB infrastructure, we deliver superior Quality of Service (QoS)—including security and compliance, performance and scalability, availability and continuity, and operational efficiency. Additionally, performance is further enhanced through the use of zIIP processors.

We achieved cost optimization by enhancing development efficiency through design patterns, best practices, and modern tooling; reducing runtime expenses with zIIP utilization (over 80% of Java workloads eligible); and minimizing modernization risks through interoperability and legacy system reuse.”

 Achievements so far are the following:

NRB Java IMS Application Development Framework V1 in production since January 2023: 5 applications, Db2 on z/OS access only)

·         Framework V2 in production since December 2024, more stable and aligned with the Java standard (Java 17 and 64 bit)

·         IMS Database support

·         Bidirectional JNI interoperability with PL/I

Roadmap for the future versions:

·         OSGI support

·         JBP batch support

·         Invocation of ODM Rules

Why is IMS application modernization so important?

In addition to IMS Java, NRB is building key assets to help customers extend the business value of their existing mainframe-based applications and data assets.

Application Integration with API and Events

We have worked extensively on application integration with API and application events.

With APIs, we provide synchronous integration through a single gateway for all z/OS assets, thanks to IBM z/OS Connect which provides the secure inbound and outbound communication that you expect with a mainframe environment.

We also provide asynchronous bidirectional integration based on MQ messaging and Events. Our applications can act as a “publisher” of events via:

•       RESTful API Call: Synchronous call API from CICS or IMS applications

•       Database Connections: Only for Db2 with Kafka connectors

•       Application Events: Event content built in applications, more personalized than a DB change; sent over MQ with Kafka MQ Connector to support transactionality

Our applications can also be “subscriber” of events managed by Kafka:

·         RESTful API calls via z/OS Connect exposed APIs

·         Database Connection: Kafka replication to Db2

·         Application events via Kafka MQ Sink Connector

Real-Time Decision Management

We have been engaged in business rules externalization very early in our thought process to separate “business decisions” from applications and bring business agility without impact on applications.

We couldn’t imagine how IBM would be investing in bringing Machine Learning on IBM Z, developing new AI processor and allowing legacy application code to benefit of an approach mixing prescriptive and predictive models to automate decisions in real time.

With IBM’s recent investments in AI and machine learning on IBM Z — including dedicated AI processors, legacy applications can integrate predictive and prescriptive models for real-time automated decision-making.

The benefits for the business could be numerous:

·         Rapid adaptation to evolving business environments: business rules can be updated by business teams on the fly without asking for application changes; and auditability of business rules is guaranteed to be compliant with regulation.

·         Enhanced day-to-day decision-making capacity of an organization: first use cases for banks and insurance have been for fraud detection at the time of fraud; other use cases exist to optimize customer calls, prevent churn and increase cross sell.

·         Real-time analysis of 100% of the business transactions without performance impact: the execution of the prescriptive model next to the IMS application brings huge value compared with execution on cloud or any distributed environment; in addition, thanks to IBM z16 and z17, the integration of predictive model at low consumption cost enriches the real-time decision management story.

About NRB

NRB was founded in the 1980s as a shared mainframe infrastructure and service center. Since then, NRB has been providing mainframe services - infrastructure and development - mainly on the IBM platform that has a capacity of over 60,000 MIPS in a z16 configuration - but also on the BUL GCOS8 platform.

NRB’s mainframe service center has become a leader in its field. Moreover, thanks to the arrival of Trigone in the group, the NRB Group’s mainframe service centre is still increasing its leading position in the mainframe field.

State-of-The-Art GEO-Resilient Data Centers

NRB has an exceptional data center infrastructure that meets the requirements of Tier 3+ (Uptime Institute): two state-of-the-art georesilient sites connected via Dark Fibre. The main site in Herstal, near Liège, consists of three data centers in separate buildings. The secondary site is located in Villers-le-Bouillet, only 30 km from the other data center. All systems are fully redundant with automatic switch-over. This configuration allows NRB to provide the highest level  of disaster recovery capabilities in Belgium:

• Recovery Point Objective (RPO) = 0 hours

• Recovery Time Objective (RTO) = 2 hours

NRB also has an 83 m² space in the Data Center, located between Brussels and Antwerp, 87 kilometers from the headquarters in Herstal. These two spaces are connected through a private network.

300 Mainframe Specialists

With over 300 mainframe specialists, the NRB Group is able to provide complete operational management as well as development and maintenance of mainframe applications in Western Europe. Their expertise covers both IBM and Bull mainframe environments:

•  100 mainframe infrastructure specialists are responsible for operational management at various levels: operations, engineering, service management, modernization, innovation, etc.

•       200 mainframe application specialists ensure the development and maintenance of applications: developers (COBOL, PL1, Java), application managers, project managers or quality assurance managers.

NRB is the leading mainframe supplier in Belgium and has the ambition to establish itself in France, thanks to Trigone and Western Europe.

Engagement Models

Contacts

Sébastien Georis:  sebastien.georis@nrb.be

Hélène Lyon: helene.lyon@nrb.be