Problem:
Is it possible to access the mainframe using Mainframe Access (MFA) with Net Express and Server Express, i.e. to access data files on the mainframe?
Resolution:
In migration projects we recommend that customers buy and use Mainframe Express Enterprise Edition (MFE EE) that includes MFA to download everything from the mainframe and test the application the first time.
Once the application works on MFE, there is a tool part of the Migration Toolkit that will create the Net Express project from the MFE project. The migration toolkit can also be used to pass the project to Server Express.
Once the application is on Enterprise Server there are different ways to access the mainframe...
- you can run a remote CICS transaction on the mainframe. This doesn't require MFA.
- if you are using UDB (remember that XDB used by MFE is not a production system) you can have remote databases on the mainframe, but this is all done using IBM's tools.
- if you access to your files using fileshare, you should be able to access fileshare on the mainframe (part of MFA isntalled with MFE) but as your mainframe files are in EBCDIC, you would have to compile your applications as CHARSET (EBCDIC) to be able to read and write on them, and customers in most situations prefer to work in ASCII once they migrate their applications to Windows or Unix so they can modernize them in that environment.
Nevertheless, it is quite unusual that customers want to migrate applications to Windows or Unix that will be highly dependent on resources on the mainframe.
A different thing is to develop applications on Windows that later are going to be in production on the mainframe (this would be done using MFE instead of Net Express or Server Express), then you have a high dependency of mainframe resources and you need something like MFA. But if you migrate an application then they should have very little or non dependency on mainframe resources.
