Unfortunately, there are not a lot of new OS/400 application development efforts underway, either among OS/400 shops or third party software developers. Efforts to get iSeries shops to "modernize" their applications have generally been translated as "move to WebSphere and Java," and only recently has IBM acknowledged that OS/400 shops have not been stampeding to follow that directive. As a result, the iSeries Development Roadmap has recently opened up to include lots of tools and, as importantly, supporting the idea that a good many iSeries users (read RPG die-hards) intend to stay lean and mean with their existing applications that work just fine, thank you very much.

However, business needs are driving companies to "webify" their applications--and increasingly that means more than just putting pretty front ends on the core legacy systems. It means forging true integration with other applications, both internal to and external to the company. If you want to be a player in the supply chain, you're going to have to get on the team. And that means integration.

That's where service-oriented architecture (SOA) comes in. Much has been written about SOA, a self-described "architecture" that might more accurately be called a methodology. It is, in short, the definition of reusable components (known as "services"), each of which contains application logic to perform a specific business function: "insert purchase order" or "validate credit rating," for example. Such services may access different systems/databases on different platforms transparently.