Transaction Servers and Tools eNews - September 2005
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CICS Scene – Richard Thomas
Many of you will be at least somewhat familiar with service- oriented architecture or SOA. It's one of the most widely discussed topics in the information technology field today. A service is simply a repeatable business task (the sort of work for which CICS transactions are so effective), and an SOA is an IT architectural style that allows you to integrate your business through the linking of services. A SOA will help you increase business flexibility and extract maximum value from your existing assets through reuse.
SOA is a concept whose time has come. The standards are in place; the IT community has established best practices based on experience; and the software that businesses need to support service orientation is here. In fact, IBM has just announced new products to round out its SOA portfolio, including WebSphere® Business Modeler, WebSphere Integration Developer, WebSphere Process Server and WebSphere Business Monitor. You can get the complete picture at ibm.com/soa.
It's important to emphasize that this is in no way a replacement for your existing IT infrastructure and investments; it extends the value of the applications and business processes that are running your business today. Dibbe Edwards, Director of CICS Development, explains below how CICS becomes a natural part of a SOA, with CICS® tools to help transform your existing CICS transactions into Web services. Once defined as Web services, business processes containing CICS transactions can be modeled, integrated, deployed and monitored using the newly announced products above.
There are other tools too, in the CICS portfolio, to help you build your new composite applications from CICS transactions. WebSphere Developer for zSeries ® supports SOA and Web service creation in the CICS environment, leveraging Enterprise COBOL and Enterprise PL/I . And if you have WebSphere Developer for zSeries, you can download the Service Flow Modeler technology to help you model a new business service, or flow, by defining an interface, outlining the execution steps and exposing it as a service or Web service.
SOA blends concepts like messaging, enterprise application integration (EAI) and application connection with well-defined, standards-based interfaces into one new architecture. But it's important to recognize that SOA is not the end of the road either - it's the next step in the evolution of flexible infrastructures. And, as always, CICS will evolve to keep abreast of industry trends.
Richard Thomas, Program Director, CICS Marketing
The view from Development - Dibbe Edwards
SOA is going to be a very significant concept for all IT shops, and you can be sure that CICS will give you the full support you need to exploit this approach. CICS Transaction Server V3.1 has major new support for Web services, allowing CICS-based applications to be integrated with a SOA, so they can be exposed as Web services. New HTTP capabilities mean that your CICS systems can request Web services as well as provide them, and distributed transaction coordination means that full CICS integrity can be maintained with partners who comply with the Web Service-Atomic (WS-Atomic) transaction specification.
You can easily wrapper CICS applications as Web services, by using the CICS-supplied Web Services Assistant (for COBOL, C/C++ and PL/I applications.) Usually, you won't have to make changes to the code, so you can start to integrate CICS applications into new business processes quickly and with low risk.
When you wrapper CICS applications in this way to expose them as services, you enter a new level of interoperability between applications. Your trusted and proven CICS applications can co-operate as peers with other systems, in mixed application environments. This is particularly valuable for integrating proven CICS applications in, say, COBOL, with applications in current programming styles like J2EE that you're building in a WebSphere environment. WebSphere Developer for zSeries is the strategic tooling for building composite applications using CICS Web services. It provides a wizard-based approach that generates your WSDL (Web Services Description Language) for you.
As a CICS customer, it's likely that you have a huge investment in CICS business transactions, and you have a critical dependency on them to run your core business. This ability to leverage them easily in new business processes makes them even more valuable, and ensures that CICS continues as a potent force in enterprise computing. My team has worked hard to ensure that the robust and resilient qualities of service that you expect from your CICS system are now extended fully into the SOA runtime environment too. You can read about just one aspect of this in the article describing the new SSL capabilities in CICS TS V3.1.
Dibbe Edwards, Director, CICS Development
New CICS support for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)
Since CICS is a natural place to support Web services, and a first class end point on an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), it was apparent that the capability, performance and scaling of securing mechanisms commonly used with TCP/IP should match the capabilities. So we've taken advantage of the very latest system SSL interfaces to the operating system to give additional cipher suites. We've also re-engineered the way we invoke that code to remove certain constraints on the number of concurrent SSL sessions that you can connect to CICS. And we've exploited certificate revocation lists in an LDAP server, to fully round out the SSL protocol support. You can read the full story in Peter Havercans article, "New CICS support for Secure Sockets Layer".
Announcing CICS Interdependency Analyzer V2.1
With the IBM SOA announcements giving SOA an even higher profile, you might be wondering how you can analyze and understand your applications to to aggregate them into services for SOA implementations.
IBM CICS Interdependency Analyzer for z/OS (CICS IA) is a run-time tool that automates detection of runtime relationships within your CICS system. This new version of CICS Interdependency Analyzer V2.1 introduces a range of enhancements that improve the way the information collected by CICS IA can be viewed, mined and used on a daily basis. The enhancements include a new Eclipse-based graphical user interface with "point and click" capabilities to navigate through data queries and resource relationships. The new interface offers comprehensive data filtering facilities. In addition, you can collect new information, and you have more control over CICS IA set-up, scheduling and data collection. Please visit www.ibm.com/cics/ianaly for the details.
More tools announcements for SOA
New releases of Enterprise Software Platform tools all contribute to supporting and building a SOA. Enterprise PL/I for z/OS V3.5 supports XML and Java™ interoperability, Fault Analyzer for z/OS V6.1 supports WebSphere®, Debug Tool for z/OS® V6.1 plus Debug Tool Utilities and Advanced Functions for z/OS V6.1 supports SOA through a WebSphere Developer for zSeries ® front end.
Reusing existing applications as Web services
An important aspect of SOA is the reuse of existing applications as services. You can download a new white paper (actually, it's more like a book) that shows you how to transform existing batch, CICS, or IMS COBOL applications into XML-aware applications or fully functional Web services. Topics include:
- How to enable existing batch, CICS, or IMS COBOL applications to operate on and produce XML data.
- How to transform an existing business function into a Web service.
- How to use the tools that WebSphere Developer for zSeries Version 6.0 provides for creating Web services from batch, CICS and IMS COBOL business function.
- How to set up and configure the CICS Transaction Server 3.1 Web services environment for running a transformed application.
- How to create, deploy, and run fully functional Web services created from a COBOL application by the CICS Transaction Server 3.1 Web services component.
- How to set up a Web service created from a COBOL application under IMS SOAP Gateway.
You can use this book as a guide to these tasks or as a reference for the XML Services for the Enterprise tools provided by WebSphere Developer for zSeries Version 6.0. Download the book here .
GUIDE SHARE EUROPE meeting in Germany
The next meeting of the international IBM usergroup GUIDE SHARE EUROPE (GSE) will take place on14-16 November 2005 in Trier, Germany. The organizers are Frank Braun and Roland Schiradin, and you can find more information about the agenda, hotel accommodations, and so on, at www.gsenet.de .
Understanding and using CICS Web Services - Montpellier
This course shows how to use the Web services support provided in CICS TS Version 3.1 to implement service requesters and service providers in CICS TS. During this workshop you will become familiar with key concepts underlying CICS support for Web Services (XML, SOAP, Web Services and SOA), and how a CICS program is deployed as a service provider and requester. You'll work with Web services samples provided for CICS TS Version 3.1, and learn how a service requester application running in WebSphere Application Server (WebSphere Studio) is deployed, and how it invokes a CICS TS Web service.
You can take this class in a classroom at Montpellier,code CI11FR , 22-24 November 2005, or as distance learning, code CI11DFR , 14-21 November or 5-12 December 2005, using a mixture of virtual classes, e-labs and self-study. Follow it from your preferred location!
CICS Transaction Gateway: Connecting WebSphere AS to CICS - Montpellier
This classroom course shows you how to use the CICS Transaction Gateway (CICS TG) to access CICS Transaction Server z/OS applications. The course focuses on the role of CICS TG as the strategic Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) Connector to CICS Transaction Server from WebSphere Application Server. The theory elements of the course detail the recommended scenarios for using CICS TG to access CICS resources from WebSphere Application Server (WAS) on both distributed platforms and on z/OS. The hands-on exercises focus on the z/OS implementation of the CICS TG: installation, configuration, deploying CICS TG applications in WebSphere Application Server on z/OS, and workload management, and security for the CICS TG for z/OS and OS/390.
You can take this class, code CI71FFR , in Montpellier during 8-10 Nov or 6-8 Dec.
CICSplex and CICSPlex SM with CICS TS workshop - Montpellier
In this class you will be provided with practical experience of working with CICSPlex System Manager and the implementation of a CICSplex in a parallel s ysplex environment. Half the time will be spent on lab exercises, mostly using the CICSPlex/SM Web User Interface (WUI). Each group of three students has its own CICSplex running in a parallel sysplex configuration. TPNS is used to simulate a real customer environment.
During this 4.5 day class, you will become familiar with the CICSplex and CICSPlex/SM environment by implementing CICSPlex/SM, and understanding CICS multi-region advantages running traditional 3270 applications as well as modern Web-based applications. You will deal with transaction affinities and interdependencies, design the CICSplex environment, and get practical experience with CICSPlex/SM capabilities including the SPOC, WLM, RTA, Monitoring and BAS functions.
You can take this class, code CIA03F , in Montpellier 10-14 October 2005.
