CICS Integration enables the re-use of CICS applications within flexible IT infrastructures via standard APIs and communication protocols.
CICS Transaction Server V3.1 provides new Web Services capabilities to extend CICS applications to a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), enabling them to be exposed directly as Web Services.
CICS is capable of being a Web Service provider and consumer enabling easier than ever integration of CICS applications into modern business-to-business services. The use of Web Services promotes loose coupling and flexible data exchanges with a high-degree of interoperability between these applications. This in turn allows virtual enterprises to link heterogeneous systems as required and for complex IT environments to be simplified.
Web Services is a standards-based interface to software components. CICS is compliant with a rich set of these standards, including the WS-I Basic Profile 1.0a to assure service requesters and providers work well together with transactional and security integrity.
Each Web Service has a file that fully defines the service and importantly how other systems can connect to it and exchange information. Consumers of the service need only this file before building their components and start using the service. This approach enables software developers to use their development environment of choice to focus on the client application, easily selecting and using Web Services available in CICS.
To ensure the easy transformation of an existing CICS application into a Web Service, there is an application development capability supplied called the CICS Web Services Assistant. This support is provided for COBOL, C, C++ and PL/I to automatically convert between XML and their language structures ensuring they are able to participate and deliver immediate value. Given the existing investment customers have made in CICS applications, the ability to easily leverage them in new business processes is of huge value.
CICS supports Web Services sent over the ubiquitous HTTP and WebSphereMQ transports for flexible deployment options dependant on application and IT requirements. The setup and systems management in CICS is via new resource definitions and configuration files and is aimed to be intuitive for existing operations staff.
To help customers adopt Web Services, a new sample application is provided which illustrates best practice techniques to implement Web Service providers and consumers. This ensures businesses can receive immediate value from CICS TS V3.1.
Those customers using the popular SOAP for CICS Feature delivered on CICS TS V2 can easily migrate to CICS TS V3 to take advantage of these major enhancements.
