The CICS web services assistant
The CICS® web services assistant is a set of batch utilities that can help you to transform existing CICS applications into web services and to enable CICS applications to use web services provided by external providers. The assistant supports rapid deployment of CICS applications for use in service providers and service requesters, with the minimum of programming effort.
When you use the web services assistant for CICS, you do not have to write your own code for parsing inbound messages and for constructing outbound messages; CICS maps data between the body of a SOAP message and the application program's data structure.
The assistant can create a WSDL document from a simple language structure or a language structure from an existing WSDL document, and supports COBOL, C/C++, and PL/I. It also generates information used to enable automatic runtime conversion of the SOAP messages to containers and COMMAREAs, and vice versa.
- DFHLS2WS
- Generates a web service binding file from a language structure. This utility also generates a web service description.
- DFHWS2LS
- Generates a web service binding file from a web service description. This utility also generates a language structure that you can use in your application programs.
The JCL procedures to run both programs are in the hlq .XDFHINST library.
The web service description (WSDL) documents that are generated by DFHLS2WS contain some automatically generated content that might be appropriate for you to change before publishing. Customizing WSDL documents can result in regenerating the web services binding file and, in some cases, writing a wrapper program. For details, see Customizing generated web service description documents.