Creating a JSON web service

You can expose existing CICS® applications as JSON web services and create new CICS applications to act as JSON web service providers.

Before you begin

Before you begin to create a JSON web service, you must configure your CICS system to support JSON web services. For more information, see Creating the CICS infrastructure for a JSON service provider.

About this task

The CICS JSON assistant is a supplied utility that helps you to create the necessary artifacts for a new JSON web service provider application, or to enable an existing application as a JSON web service provider.

The CICS JSON assistant can create a JSON schema from a high-level language structure or a high-level language structure from an existing JSON schema; it supports COBOL, C/C++, and PL/I. It also generates information that is used to enable automatic runtime conversion of the JSON messages to containers and COMMAREAs, and vice versa. This information is used by the CICS JSON web services support during pipeline processing.

Create your JSON web service, as described in the following procedure, and validate that it works correctly:

Procedure

  1. Create a JSON web service.
    Use the JSON assistant to create the JSON schema or language structures and deploy them into CICS. Use the PIPELINE SCAN command to automatically create the required CICS resources.
  2. Start the JSON web service to test that it works as you intended.

What to do next

These steps are explained in more detail in the following topics.