This topic describes how to develop your application. There are
a number of ways to develop a Java application that accesses a host IMS transaction.
One way to develop a Java application is to write the application yourself,
using the J2C Common Client Interface (CCI) provided by the IMS resource adapter.
Another way is to use one of IBM's integrated development environments to
generate the Java application for you. Examples of these integrated development
environments are WebSphere Studio Application Developer Integration Edition
and Rational Application Developer with the J2EE Connector tools. The code
generated by these development environments also uses the J2C Common Client
Interface. Using a development environment has the following benefits:
- Wizards and guides to lead you step-by-step through the development process
and generate wrappers for most code artifacts.
- Easily develop applications that are compliant with J2EE standards.
- Tools to automate mapping data sources to EJBs, to manage EJB deployment
descriptors and EAR file packaging and deployment, and a built-in test client
for EJBs.
If you choose to write the application yourself, you can still take advantage
of the functionality of Rational Application Developer by using the wizards
provided by the J2C Connector tools to build data structures for the transaction
input and output messages required by your "CCI application".
The process of building a Java application using the J2C Connector tools
of Rational Application Developer can be divided into three steps:
- Create IMS data bindings for the input and output message of the IMS transaction.
- Create a J2C Java bean that has a method that communicates with IMS to
run the IMS transaction using the J2EE Connector Architecture. This method
uses IMS data bindings created earlier.
- Create a J2EE resource that wraps the functionality of the J2C Java bean
and creates an application that can be used to run the transaction in IMS.
This process is described in more detail in the sections that follow.