What's new

CICS® Transaction Server for z/OS®, Version 5 Release 2 builds on the advances in service agility and operational efficiency delivered in CICS TS for z/OS 5.1 and makes significant advances in positioning CICS users for cloud computing.

These capabilities are represented in three areas: service agility, operational efficiency and cloud enablement, with a number of features in each area.

The features of this release are available in each of the CICS Transaction Server for z/OS 5.2 editions:
  • CICS Transaction Server for z/OS, Version 5 Release 2
  • CICS Transaction Server for z/OS Developer Trial, Version 5 Release 2
  • CICS Transaction Server for z/OS Value Unit Edition, Version 5 Release 2
In addition, CICS Transaction Server for z/OS Developer Trial, Version 5 Release 2 is now fully supported and can be upgraded to another CICS TS edition without requiring CICS to be reinstalled.

This section introduces the new features. Alternatively, if you have access to YouTube, you can see a summary of what's new in this short video. Detailed information on all the changes introduced in this release is in the rest of the product documentation for each edition of CICS Transaction Server for z/OS 5.2.

At a glance

  • Service agility:
    • Increased capability and portability for Web applications written in Java™ to make it easier to develop, test, and run web applications.
    • Easier interaction with mobile devices and mobile-optimized gateways to simplify the use of existing CICS services by mobile applications.
    • Support for z/OS Connect Enterprise Editionz/OS Connect Enterprise Edition is a separately orderable IBM® product that enables API developers to construct JSON APIs from JSON services.
    • Easier interaction with mobile devices and mobile-optimized gateways to simplify the use of existing CICS services by mobile applications.
    • Increased flexibility in data mapping to represent a larger range of characters in web services that were generated from different language sources.
    • Increased support for high-availability scenarios to minimize the potential impact of issues when CICS communicates across a wide area network.
    • Flexible installation to make it easier to switch between offerings of CICS Transaction Server..
  • Operational efficiency:
    • Increased support for policy-based management to help regulate your CICS environment and enable autonomic responses to breaches of policy.
    • Increased security capabilities to ensure that services hosted by CICS can conform to security standards and integrate more securely with a wide range of distributed platforms.
    • Performance enhancements to reduce storage that is used by web services and increase the range of threadsafe commands.
    • Diagnostic improvements to make it easier to determine the cause of problems.
    • Improved search, integration, and customization of IBM documentation to make it easier for you to find the information that you need for all the IBM products that you use.
  • Cloud enablement:
    • Lifecycle management of multiple versions of applications to provide the flexibility to install and manage multiple versions of application on the same platform instance.
    • Integration of CICS applications with cloud-based infrastructure to manage and deploy CICS web services as cloud components.
    • Increased scope for resource management in CICS bundles to make it easier to manage CICS resources as part of a platform.

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