There are a zillion ways to connect to services on mainframes, depending on what you call a mainframe and what you need to get to. In my world mainframe means MVS/CICS/COBOL/DB2. You can "screen scrape" an existing green screen (choice of last resort), use database gateways, JDBC, MQ-Series, External Call Interface, proprietary middleware of all sizes and shapes. If you run
J2EE on WebSphere, I think IBM has a suite of connectors to most anything else they make. You can even run WebSphere on Linux on the mainframe and use J2EE for communication.
So, the field is target rich as they say in TV wars. Zactly what do you have to hook up to?
[ July 24, 2003: Message edited by: Stan James ]