For the past six years I've been engaged in a project to re-engineer a legacy
enterprise IT system of a large international bank. The company still had
applications with host terminal emulation that were to be replaced with
Windows- and Web-based client applications. The host system was completed
based on legacy applications that evolved since the 1970s. Any new
applications had to interoperate with the existing legacy applications. A
strategy to replace difficult-to-maintain legacy applications with new
applications was implemented.
Within these constraints, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) was introduced
into the existing system. The dependency on the interfaces, performance, and
transaction scopes of the legacy system prohibited any change to, or mixing
with, other programming languages. All host applications were still developed
in COBOL, while Windows-based... (more)