eCube Systems said that its latest NXTera remote procedure call (RPC) middleware for Web services will enable organizations to use contemporary development frameworks and migrate applications to the cloud while maintaining integrations with legacy systems.
NXTera 6.0, which shipped today, provides an upgrade path for applications that were built using legacy RPC middleware, including EZRPCS and eCube’s Entera. Older RPC technologies include runtimes that were not compiled for Linux and do not support virtualization stacks, said eCube vice president of marketing Peter Marquez.
NXTera supports platforms including zLinux on the IBM mainframe z platform, in addition to IRIX, Mac OS X, OpenVMS, Red Hat, SUSE and Unix.
New network Address Translation functionality was added to help customers implement virtualization solutions. NXTera 6.0 adds a native MySQL data access server, an updated JDBC version, and Google’s Protocol Buffers serialization format.
“It’s a straightforward way to integrate legacy code with Python, RESTful services or a Spring environment,” Marquez said.
An Eclipse-based development workbench includes wizards and tools to generate Web services, legacy interfaces, and the necessary plumbing for communications back and forth, said Marquez. The workbench supports distributed RPC, .NET and SOAP development with C, COBOL, Fortran and Java. Client stubs are generated in C#, Java and Python.
“There hasn’t been a critical release of standard RPC technology to the marketplace in many years that allow legacy to participate fully with contemporary environments and that gives developers lightweight RPC tools,” Marquez claimed.
eCube has also bundled NXTminder, a new runtime management tool, as a replacement for existing tools (AppMinder and AppSensor) that are commonly used to manage the availability of Entera and COBRA RPC applications, he said. NXTminder is a platform-independent application management tool that manages application dependencies.
