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Exposing ChangeMan ZMF function through REST Services

Many existing ZMF users are exploring Agile development and automated tool chains as part of a continual improvement process for accelerating Mainframe Application development. The role of ZMF in these processes is changing with the requirement being that ZMF now participate rather than drive the development process as sites move to continuous integration and delivery pipelines.

A number of large ZMF sites are building workflows with a variety of proprietary and open source technologies and want to be able to integrate their ZMF implementation into these new pipelines.

The requirement is support the user needs to be able to integrate ZMF as part of an automated workflow by exposing ZMF functions as REST apis that will enable these functions to be initiated from a participating subscriber in an automated workflow.

As a generic requirement it is key to make sure the api meets the standards and requirements that are expected in this space. This means ensuring the following:

  1. Supports a REST-based interface

  2. Supports an HTTP callback (WebHook) mechanism for event notification. This will provide the push mechanism from ZMF to whatever distributed orchestration started the workflow, such as Jenkins. This is a specific implementation of the bidirectional support.

  3. Provides a secure interface. Credentials are not visible in scripts and are transmitted securely. Others use a Jenkins plug-in to generate a pass token that is passed in the REST api.