There is a lot of interest in updating mainframe technology/interfaces across traditional enterprises. As development environments and toolsets have evolved outside the mainframe, there is a struggle to keep up—partially because backward compatibility requirements make wild changes difficult and partly because the very architecture of mainframes is different.
There have been several fragmented efforts over the last few years—some of them quite good—to update how a mainframe is accessed from an external source and the ways that developers can code for the mainframe. After all, the number of developers proficient in mainframe toolsets continues to decline while the number of workloads does not, so something has to change.
The Open Mainframe Project’s Zowe attempts to address these issues in ways that are both more widely applicable and more technologically advanced. It takes advantage of Open Source REST systems to front-end hardcore mainframe functionality, so developers who are accustomed to application server development can call things such as Spring Boot-based interfaces and use languages including Node.Js to access their mainframe systems.
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