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If a customer finds a bug in your application, wouldn't it be great if you could build, test and deploy a fix in hours or days, rather than in weeks or months? Reducing turn-around time and aiming for continuous delivery allows your organization to constantly improve and evolve the applications and services provided to customers. There's no reason why your CICS-based applications and services shouldn't be included in the continuous delivery model.   Continuous integration and CICS Let's say you have two teams, one team that... [More]

Tags:  rational blog virtualization cics_tg devops

In our recent blog post about the new mobile support in CICS Transaction Gateway (CICS TG) we discussed how easy it was to create a new application to access existing CICS resources. In this blog post I'll show you how I put together a sample application which makes use of the programs and data provided by the the GENAPP support pac . The architecture of the completed solution looks like Setting up CICS TG Configuring the Gateway daemon for http requests To allow the Gateway daemon to receive and process http requests I added the following... [More]

Tags:  blog cics_tg mobile

CICS provides different levels of tracing to assist with problem determination. Standard trace level 1 is the default setting for each component to be traced within CICS.  The user can use CETR to specify what trace levels are set for each component of CICS. By default, INTTR, SYSTR and USERTR are set ON.  This means the master system and user trace flags default to be set on, and internal tracing is active. STNTR defaults to 1, as do all the STNTRxx values. This means standard trace component tracing defaults to level 1 for all CICS... [More]

Tags:  serviceabilty

One of the frequent questions we receive from customers is "How can I customize the CICS Explorer GUI, for instance by removing items that confuse my internal users?" While removing GUI items is not something we provide support for, because CICS Explorer is built on top of Eclipse technology there is an Eclipse technique you can use to hide some elements of the GUI. In this blog post I'll walk you through some using an activity to hide a GUI item, techniques for establishing whether a GUI item might be hideable, and how to deploy... [More]

Tags:  cics_explorer howto blog

It's been a busy 18 months for the IBM CICS and Problem Determination Tools development teams, keeping pace with the latest and greatest in CICS TS for z/OS V5.2 and adding lots of new capabilities as well. New releases of five core CICS Tools plus an updated Solution Pack, together with enabling PTFs (where required) for PD Tools will help you to maximize the benefits from the latest run-time release. Don't worry if you are running an earlier release of CICS - most of the new capabilities will help you too. Here's a brief... [More]

Tags:  pdtools cics_tools blog

The CICS Transaction Gateway for z/OS V9.1 open beta includes new capabilities enabling HTTP clients to invoke COMMAREA or Channel-based CICS programs using JSON data, while benefiting from the established high availability and instrumentation features which CICS Transaction Gateway customers already rely upon.    Based upon the WS BIND data transformation technology and tooling already used for CICS Transaction Server web services, the proven reliability and scalability of CICS TG delivers further options for robust integration of... [More]

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Using JCA with the CICS TG in WebSphere Liberty Profile The April betas of the WebSphere Liberty Profile provide an optional feature which enables support for the Java Connector Architecture (JCA) part of the Java Enterprise Edition (JEE) specification. As this has been one of the primary methods for connecting to CICS with the CICS TG, it made sense for me to check not only that it works in Liberty, but also how to make use of the CICS TG resource adapters from applications in a remote mode topology. Getting the beta Head over to... [More]

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This article describes how to deploy a Java application that uses the IBM MQ classes for Java into a CICS OSGi or Liberty JVM server Requirements To follow the setup in this article you should already have performed the following:  S etup CICS to access MQ, this includes adding the correct datasets to the CICS region STEPLIB, and defining the MQCONN resource definition. Installed the CICS Explorer V5.2 and added the WDT tools if developing Web applications. Successfully created and started a JVM server in CICS You will require the... [More]

Tags:  article mq howto eclipse jvm_server liberty

Many of us have used CICS Explorer to manage CICS. But did you know that you can use the underlying CICS Management Client Interface (CMCI) from your browser (or any other HTTP client)? The CMCI request structure consists of an HTTP header with a method (GET, PUT, POST, DELETE) followed by a URI (Universal Resource Identifier) and an optional XML body containing details of any changes to be made to CICS or CICSPlex SM resources To try out the examples you need to know the hostname (called yourHostName in this article) and the CMCI port (called... [More]

Tags:  blog howto cmci http article restful cics_explorer

IBM Knowledge Center will soon become the central location for online documentation about IBM products, replacing all the separate information centers. You do not need to take any action, links to the existing CICS information centers will be automatically redirected to IBM Knowledge Center from May onwards, but you will notice some changes in the look and function of the CICS online documentation. You can find the IBM Knowledge Center here: www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/. Why are information centers changing? Clients have told IBM... [More]

Tags:  manuals publications ibm-knowledge-center information-center cics documentation kc ibm knowledge-center information pdf

Abstract: CICS CMCI connections can only be defined manually in CICS Explorer. This is suitable if you have to create a small number of connections but does not fit if you have to define a large number of connections. This document will show you how to generate Connections.pref from an Open Office spread sheet. This article is based on CICS Explorer 5.1.1 Objective: Generate Connections.pref from Open Office spread sheet (See picture below) How you will reach your objective: By following this guide you will define an XML Filter on OpenOffice.... [More]

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In my previous article “What is CICS Application Multi-versioning?” I described how the new multi-versioning capability in the CICS TS V5.2 open beta could be used to eliminate name clashes when hosting independently developed applications on the same CICS platform. This allows you to take advantage of the increased operational efficiency and reduce the number of regions required. In this article I will explain how use to the multi-versioning capability to increase service agility.   Service agility allows... [More]

Tags:  cloud blog multi-versioning applications

[7/Oct - article updated to refer to CICS TS V5.2 and some WASDev links updated] CICS TS V5.2  includes the latest WebSphere Application Server Liberty Profile (WLP) V8.5.5 that provides features for the  Java API for XML Web Services  ( JAX-WS ) and the  Java Architecture for XML Binding ( JAXB ). Together these technologies enable you to write SOAP web services in Java as part of a CICS application. You may be thinking, why not use the CICS TS native web services stack as it is fast, efficient and good at mapping... [More]

Tags:  java article web_services blog liberty jvm_server