How BlueZone HostFront Works

HostFront has two components, a Visual Studio .NET plug-in and a runtime server. The HostFront plug-in gives developers a familiar, drag-and-drop interface within Visual Studio .NET to create Web services and .NET classes that access mainframe and iSeries hosts. At runtime, the services communicate to the legacy application using the HostFront server.

The HostFront plug-in is an advanced Visual Studio .NET extension based entirely on managed code. It fully integrates with Microsoft’s Visual Studio .NET through the VSIP interface and generates Web services in C# or VB.NET code. Developer interaction with legacy applications is completely visual - developers simply navigate through a series of host screens to complete a business function while HostFront generates code as they go.

With the HostFront plug-in, developers can use sessions from single or multiple instances of either IBM mainframe (zSeries) or iSeries sessions. It also has the capability to generate Web services that connect to HostFront session pools and take advantage of its session parking, load balancing and fail-over feature to give a final application much better performance.

HostFront’s capability to automatically generate reusable Web services makes it an important tool that reduces development time and facilitates the implementation of an SOA. Once a Web service is generated with HostFront, it can be reused by other Web or Windows applications.

Additionally, HostFront brings added security with its 3-tiered architecture which provides an obfuscation layer that avoids direct screen access to host systems. When a client calls the Web service or .NET class built with HostFront, only the service is called, avoiding direct access to the mainframe or iSeries host. Furthermore, the Web service or .NET class must authenticate with the HostFront server component before the server will perform any requested action against the mainframe or iSeries host.