Spring Boot support in CICS

The CICS® Liberty JVM server supports Spring Boot applications by using the Spring application programming model. Spring Boot provides a simpler and faster way of configuring, building, and running Spring applications. Spring was originally designed to simplify Java™ Enterprise Edition (EE), by using plain old Java objects (POJOs) and dependency injection. It now extends and encompasses many aspects of Java EE development. Spring Boot builds on Spring by adding components to avoid complex configuration, reduce development time, and offer a simpler startup experience. Most Spring Boot applications require little Spring configuration. For more information about Spring and Spring Boot, see Spring Boot overview.

Spring Boot applications can run on CICS Liberty without modification by configuring the springBoot-1.5 or springBoot-2.0 features and deploying them as applications of 'type="spring"', as JAR files with .spring extension in dropins, or as JAR files with .jar extension in dropins/spring. It also is possible to configure Spring Boot applications for integration with CICS transactions and security, and to call the CICS API by using JCICS. For more information on integrations, see Spring Boot applications.

When built as a web application archive (WAR), a Spring Boot application can be deployed and managed by using CICS bundles in the same way as can other CICS Liberty applications. A Spring Boot application can use the annotation @CICSProgram to define a method as the target of a CICS program. This can be linked from COBOL or other non-Java CICS programs by using the channel and container interface.