Creating business services from CICS applications
Applications that are business services can participate in a service-oriented architecture (SOA). A business service is a service that is aligned with business processes and models rather than a technical implementation. You can expose existing and new CICS applications as part of a business service using the support provided in CICS.
You can create two types of service from your CICS applications:
- Channel-based services
- These services use the Service Component Architecture (SCA) support to expose applications as service components. The interface for these services is a channel. Channel-based services can be called only by other CICS applications using the INVOKE SERVICE API command.
- XML-based services
- These services are typically Web service provider or requester applications that use XML to interface with other applications and use a binding to transform the data. You can also describe Web service applications as components using SCA. The interface for these services is XML with a binding to transform the data. XML-based services can be called by other CICS applications using the INVOKE SERVICE API command or by an external client.
Both types of service use the pipeline support in CICS.