Developing web services

CICS® supports two distinct web service protocols, the SOAP and the JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) protocols.

You can expose existing CICS applications as SOAP web services and create CICS applications to act as SOAP web service providers or requesters.

You can expose existing CICS applications as JSON web services and create CICS applications to act as JSON web service providers. CICS does not provide built in support for requester mode JSON web services. But you can write CICS application programs to call a RESTful web service hosted on another system.

Follow this section to deploy your CICS applications in a web services environment based on the protocol used.

Before you begin

For fundamentals on CICS support for web services, see CICS and web services.