Creating business services from CICS applications

Applications that are business services can participate in a service-oriented architecture (SOA). A business service is a service that is aligned with business processes and models rather than a technical implementation. You can expose existing and new CICS applications as part of a business service using the support provided in CICS.

You can create two types of service from your CICS applications:

Channel-based services

These services use the Service Component Architecture (SCA) support to expose applications as service components. The interface for these services is a channel. Channel-based services can be called only by other CICS applications using the INVOKE SERVICE API command.

XML-based services

These services are typically web service provider or requester applications that use XML to interface with other applications and use a binding to transform the data. You can also describe web service applications as components using SCA. The interface for these services is XML with a binding to transform the data. XML-based services can be called by other CICS applications using the INVOKE SERVICE API command or by an external client.

An XML-based service can also be an application that uses the TRANSFORM API commands to map application data to and from XML. The XML assistant uses a language structure or XML schema to generate the XML binding and also create a bundle.

Both types of service use the pipeline support in CICS.