The Service Flow Modeler

Service Flow Modeler is a tool that enables you to create new services from existing applications in which the enterprise has substantial investments in time and money.

The tool enables you to create new services of existing applications in which the enterprise has substantial investments in time and money. You are recommended to use Service Flow Modeler in IBM® Rational® Developer for System z® to use the latest set of enhancements in the runtime environment.

The Service Flow Modeler consists of several major components that are shown in the following figure.

Figure 1. Components of Service Flow Modeler
This graphic depicts three major components of Service Flow Modeler. These are the importers and editors, the flow editor, and the runtime code generator and deployment wizard. The Importers and Flow editor use the Eclipse modeling framework to work with source artifacts such as 3270 and 5250 screens or COBOL. The runtime code generator turns the flow into an adapter service that can be deployed into the CICS Service Flow Runtime environment.
Importers and editors
The importers enable you to input application resources from an existing Enterprise Information System (EIS) for the purpose of representing these resources within a common information model. The resources that can be imported include:
  • 3270 screens from CICS® 3270 applications
  • 5250 screens from 5250 applications on OS/400® systems
  • COBOL record descriptions from existing CICS transactions
  • BMS source code to build application data structures. (ADS)
The editors enable you to control what is imported, as well as modifying the imported resources, modeling sequence flows and saving work.
The Flow editor
The Flow editor allows you to manually construct an adapter service that represents a dialogue, as well as populate a sequence flow using a captured WSDL dialogue. Alternatively, you can use the Flow editor to annotate a flow with alternative paths of the host application that represent error paths, as well as additional business behaviors that cannot be captured using the importers.
Runtime code generator and deployment wizard
When you have finished modeling your flow, you can use the wizard to generate an Adapter service that can be deployed into CICS Service Flow Runtime.

For more information about Service Flow Modeler, see the relevant help sections in the tooling product.