Creating a SOAP web service

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

Before you begin

Before you begin to create a SOAP web service, perform these tasks:
  1. Configure your CICS system to support web services; see Configuring your CICS system for web services.
  2. Create the necessary infrastructure to support the deployment of your web services; see Creating the web services infrastructure.
  3. Decide whether you want to use the web services assistant; see Planning to use SOAP web services.

About this task

The CICS web services assistant is a supplied utility that helps you to create the necessary artifacts for a new SOAP web service provider or a service requester application, or to enable an existing application as a web service provider.

The CICS web services assistant can create a WSDL document from a simple language structure or a language structure from an existing WSDL document; it supports COBOL, C/C++, and PL/I. It also generates information that is used to enable automatic runtime conversion of the SOAP messages to containers and COMMAREAs, and vice versa. This information is used by the CICS web services support during pipeline processing.

Create your web service, as described in the following procedure, and validate that it works correctly:

Procedure

  1. Create a SOAP web service in one of four ways:
    • Use the web services assistant to create the web service description or language structures and deploy them into CICS. Use the PIPELINE SCAN command to automatically create the required CICS resources.
    • Use Rational® Developer for z System z® or the Java™ API to create the web service description or language structures and deploy them into CICS. Use the PIPELINE SCAN command to automatically create the required CICS resources.
    • Create or change an application program to handle the XML in the inbound and outbound messages, including the data conversion, and populate the correct containers in the pipeline. You must create the required CICS resources manually.
    • Deploy an Axis2 application as a web service.
  2. Start the web service to test that it works as you intended.
    If you are using the web services assistant to deploy your web service, you can use the SET WEBSERVICE command to turn on validation. This validation checks that the data is converted correctly.

What to do next

These steps are explained in more detail in the following topics.