CICS and SOAP web services

You can expose existing CICS® applications as SOAP web services and create CICS applications to act as SOAP web service providers or requesters. CICS supports two different approaches to the deployment of your CICS applications in a web services environment. One approach enables rapid deployment, with the least amount of programming effort; the other approach gives you complete flexibility and control over your web service applications, using code that you write to suit your particular needs. Both approaches are underpinned by an infrastructure consisting of one or more pipelines and message handler programs that operate on web service requests and responses.

When you deploy your CICS applications in a web services environment you can choose from the following options:
  • Use the CICS web services assistant to help you deploy an application with the least amount of programming effort.

    For example, if you want to expose an existing application as a web service, you can start with a high-level language data structure and generate the web services description. Alternatively, if you want to communicate with an existing web service, you can start with its web service description and generate a high-level language structure that you can use in your program.

    The CICS web services assistant also generates the CICS resources that you need to deploy your application. And when your application runs, CICS transforms your application data into a SOAP message on output and transforms the SOAP message back to application data on input.

  • Take complete control over the processing of your data by writing your own code to map between your application data and the message that flows between the service requester and provider.

    For example, if you want to use non-SOAP messages within the web service infrastructure, you can write your own code to transform between the message format and the format used by your application.

Whichever approach you follow, you can use your own message handlers to perform additional processing on your request and response messages, or use CICS-supplied message handlers that are designed especially to help you process SOAP messages.