Thimbles & Care

For administrative computing at the University, integration is one of our greatest strengths, but it also may be our greatest weakness.

Integration is a strength, because when different applications need to work together they do so easily.

Integration is a weakness, because when an application needs to change those changes must be coordinated with the other applications it works with. This is greatly highlighted when we consider possible projects like the proposed mainframe migration.

When I first started working here, integration usually happened at the Adabas file level. If application A needed access to application B’s data, application A was given appropriate database permissions. But now if application B wanted to change their file layout, it had to be coordinated with application A. Also, there are clearly security implications for this.

So we invented secured modules. This has helped with the security issues, but I don’t think it has decoupled applications as much as we might want.

Is there a next step, something to replace secured modules to decouple our applications more? Some way for applications to communicate more flexibly, so different areas can move in different directions more easily? Doing more with Broker might be one way, but at a significant cost in performance. Where one application is moving off the mainframe, Adabas Replicator might be a useful tool. Any other ideas?