Future career path in integration of J2EE with Mainframe applications.

[Sabyasachi Mitra]

Dear Friends,

I beg your purdon if this is not the right forum for this type your question. i am a mainrframe programmer, since last 2 yrs i am dealing with Cobol, Assembler, Vsam, CICS and Jcl stuff, but as so many organizations are going to integrate thir mainframe application with J2EE application to make them web enabled i feel its good to learn J2EE stuff.

I have knowledge of Core Java, my question is how convenient it will be for me to learn J2EE ? as organizations are planing for makeing their mainframe applications web enabled, can i drive my future career into that direction(integrating Mainframe applications with J2EE) by learning J2EE.

I welcome all the opinions regd. this.
[ February 09, 2005: Message edited by: sabyasachi mitra ]

[Fisher Daniel]

Hi Sabya,
If you have knowledge about Core Java (J2SE), I think it is sufficient for you to start study J2EE.
J2EE is a platform to build an enterprise application and it have a good future for us.
We can develope an application that it is running in multiple application server vendor.
You can get more information about J2EE and all technologies inside J2EE at Java site .

thanks
daniel

[Sabyasachi Mitra]

Hello daniel

Thanks a lot,
i am planing to start J2EE, my intention is to use my mainframe skill(CICS,Cobol,Assembler,Vsam,DB2) along with J2ee skill set.

[Stan James]

That's not a bad combination. Lots of organizations are doing Java and mainframe integration and many Java folk don't even know the CICS vocabulary. You may find you have exactly the right skill combo for some company. I'm on a J2EE project now, but we have (and need!) a couple COBOL folks yet.

So you probably should grow your vanilla J2SE Java skills and get J2EE servlet and EJB training or self-training at some point. Then Google for Java CICS integration tools. IBM has a variety of connectors, database vendors, "enterprise integration" vendors and terminal emulation vendors have others. MQ-Series is also pretty cool. IBM even runs EJBs on the mainframe in a Unix partition with APIs to and from CICS, but that sounds just too weird for me. Any mainframe UDB experience will translate well to AIX-UDB, too.

Big companies like mine think J2EE when they think Java apps. So finally, yes, a track that includes EJBs and Servlets would be good around here at least. Good luck!