With our CICS Explorer 5.1 release, we did a lot of work on SSL.   You might be thinking "Joe - that's really boring - why are you wasting blog space boasting about that", however bear with me for a tadge longer.  Do you think that SSL is the thing that puts the little padlock in the bottom corner of the browser and if it's there you can trust the website to do money related stuff, and if it's not then you might be ripped off by someone spying on you ?  If so then you were sort of like me a couple of years ago - however SSL is... [More]

Tags:  cicsexplorer pa ia zosexplorer ssl da zosmf cm ftp

On December 14th 2012 - just before a well earned holiday break - we launched CICS Transaction Server 5.1 .  Loads of good new stuff in the release, not all of which came from great ideas that smart folks like us had in IBM, but more than 100 customer requirements coming from FITS - or its replacement RFE - were in the release content.  And it was done in 18 months, rather then usual 2 years between CICS releases.  Like I said - the holiday  break was well earned.   Each time we release a new version of CICS we also deliver a new version of the... [More]

Tags:  cicsexplorer zosexplorer

The CICS Explorer lets you connect to CICS regions and do CICSey things - such as viewing and killing tasks.  It also lets you connect to z/OS and do zosey things such as submitting jobs and looking at their spool.  If you have a plugin, such as Debug Tool, or Interdependency Analyzer, you can also connect to more things and do more stuff.  One thing that's particularly neat and we've quite proud of is that the way you connect to the various host:port combinations - the way you switch connections - the way user IDs and passwords are captured... [More]

Tags:  cicsexplorer telnet sdk

I just finished writing up an entry for this blog about new stuff in the CICS Explorer 1.1.1 release and showed it to a colleague.  He read it and finished up by saying "Joe, this is all great content, you've showed how to create data sets, how to view the JES spool for an active CICS region, how to purge more than one job at a time, but this is all z/OS stuff - where is the CICS stuff ?  I thought you were supposed to be the CICS Explorer ?".   Apart from having a big argument where I tried to point out that to be a CICS user you... [More]

Tags:  cicsexplorer eclipse

 We've just released our latest modification update to the CICS Explorer which is available either on our download site , or if you have a copy of the CICS Explorer 1.1.0 you can upgrade it to the 1.1.1 release by using the menu option Help -> Check for Updates .  What the Check for updates does is contact our support team's update site which we include whenever we ship a CICS Explorer - see that there's a newer version - and then automagically turns your CICS Explorer 1.1.0 into a CICS Explorer 1.1.1.     Our homepage has details of what's... [More]

Tags:  cicsexplorer z/os eclipse pd

This blog entry talks about how to install MQ Explorer 7.1 into CICS Explorer 1.1. Before MQ Explorer 7.1 the solution was a bit tricky, and involved either downloading an seemingly unnecessary Eclipse environment, as well as copying files between directories on disk.  We've made it much better though with MQ Explorer 7.1, so put the kettle on and hopefully it'll be ready for a nice cup of tea by the time you've finished reading this and got it all working !.    For those of you who have tried to get the MQ Explorer and CICS Explorer working... [More]

Tags:  mqexplorer cicsexplorer cics mq

When you start the CICS Explorer you start the cicsexplorer.exe runnable program.  This creates a Java Virtual Machine and loads in the CICS Explorer Java classes and you can do cool stuff to CICS.  The first time you start the CICS Explorer you get presented with a Welcome screen, and after closing this you might create a couple of connections, open some views for resources not on the default perspective, possibly move some views around, and maybe customize the columns for some views to get additional attributes.   The CICS Explorer stores... [More]

Tags:  workspaces eclipse cicsexplorer

CICS Explorer lets you connect to CICS regions - this is cool.  You can do stuff such as look at tasks, installed programs, definitions, and tons more.  One of the things you can do is look at WebSphere MQ Connections for CICS regions - this is effectively the wire that shunts work from CICS down to MQ.  You can install the MQ connection definition and see the status of the connection.  Wouldn't it be cool if you could look at the queue manager itself and see the queues, browse their messages, post messages, test whether the queue is working... [More]

Tags:  tool plugin cicsexplorer mqexplorer eclipse debug