The CICS catalog manager example application

The CICS® catalog manager example application is a working COBOL application that is designed to illustrate best practice when connecting CICS applications to external clients and servers.

The example is constructed around a simple sales catalog and order processing application, in which a user can perform these tasks:

List the items in a catalog.
Inquire on individual items in the catalog.
Order items from the catalog.

The catalog is implemented as a VSAM file.

The base application has a 3270 user interface, but the modular structure, with well-defined interfaces between the components, makes it possible to add further components. In particular, the application comes with web service support, which is designed to illustrate how you can extend an existing application into the web services environment.

For this example, the CICS Explorer is used to install and deploy the application. The CICS Explorer is an Eclipse-based graphical tooling interface for CICS.