Creating the web services infrastructure

To deploy a web service to CICS®, you must create the necessary transport infrastructure and define one or more pipelines that process your web services requests. Typically, one pipeline can process requests for many different web services, and, when you deploy a new web service in your CICS system, you can choose to use an existing pipeline.

When CICS processes a web service request, it uses a pipeline of one or more message handlers to handle the request. A pipeline is configured to provide aspects of the execution environment that apply to different categories of applications, such as support for web service security and web service transactions. Typically, a CICS region that has a large number of service provider or service requester applications needs several different pipeline configurations. However, where different applications have similar requirements, they can share the same pipeline configuration. The configuration of a pipeline is specified in an XML document, known as a pipeline configuration file, and its name is specified in the CONFIGFILE attribute of a PIPELINE resource definition. For reference information about pipeline configuration elements, see XML elements for web services pipeline configuration.

A pipeline links to message handlers and to header processing programs, if they are used, by using a channel that has a number of containers. CICS uses containers to pass information to and from these programs. The programs also use containers to communicate with other programs in the pipeline. For details about the containers used in web service pipelines, see Containers used in web services pipelines.