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February 08, 2006Why the Software AG News is News
“Software AG, Inc. today announced the availability of a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) gateway as part of its new Adabas 2006 product line. Adabas SOA Gateway lets developers access Adabas 2006 data using their familiar environment – including Java/Eclipse, .NET and AJAX – without any previous knowledge of Adabas or the mainframe.”
Press releases like this on rarely get on people’s radar screens, and for good reasons. However, this is indeed a significant event as we move towards SOAs, the Web 2.0, and the Mashups of all of the above.
Why? It’s bridging the old with the new, something that has been occurring too slowly, if you ask me. The ability to make existing, but productive systems, work and play with the notion of a SOA. This means they can be dealt with as true services, and not some wiggy proprietary API that must be abstracted.
In this case, Adabas, a very popular mainframe database, largely due to its performance and unique database model, can now be exposed as a service, and thus deal with other services, either through composite application development, orchestration, or both. Pretty simple concept, but the big iron software guys are slow to take these older systems to the service model. Looks like Software AG is much more forward thinking.
Good news for those of you leveraging Adabas, your SOA journey just got a bit easier.
Posted by davel at 09:54 AM in
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A remaining problem, however, is that many of the organizations using ADABAS users that I know are using ancient versions, and consider the ADABAS apps to be legacy code so have no intentions of updating to the newer versions: they'll port their apps to another database platform rather than try to upgrade ADABAS. I agree that it's significant that the old timers are getting on the SOA bandwagon, however.
Posted by: sandy kemsley at February 11, 2006 12:45 PM
Upgrading ADABAS is quite a simple task.
Unless the organizations who are on ancient versions are not paying maintenance (where the issue may be that they would have to pay to get the current version), there is simply no reason to not be on the current version (especially when compared to the time and money involved in porting to a different database and platform).
Backward compatability is extremely high, if not 100%. I know of applications written for V4 (25 years old) that are compatible with V7.4.4 today.
Most people make decisions to switch database engines for reasons other than price, performance, or TCO. The decisions are usually emotional decisions rather than objective, business decisions.
Posted by: Wayne Campos at February 13, 2006 11:56 AM
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