Developing web services

Creating a JSON web service
You can expose existing CICS applications as JSON web services and create new CICS applications to act as JSON web service providers.
Mapping and transforming application data and XML
You can write application programs to transform application binary data into XML and vice versa. CICS supports a number of high-level languages and provides an XML assistant to map how the data is transformed during runtime processing. CICS uses the same technology for mapping application data to XML in SOAP messages, as part of the web services support.
Mapping and transforming application data and JSON
You can write application programs to transform application binary data into JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) and vice versa. CICS supports a number of high-level languages and provides a JSON assistant to map how the data is transformed during runtime processing. CICS uses the same technology for mapping application data to JSON messages, as part of the web services support.
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.
Creating a web service provider by using the web services assistant
You can create a service provider application from a web service description that complies with WSDL 1.1 or WSDL 2.0, or from a high-level language data structure. The CICS web services assistant helps you to deploy your CICS applications in a service provider setting.
Creating a web service requester using the web services assistant
You can create a service requester application from a web service description that complies with WSDL 1.1 or WSDL 2.0. The CICS web services assistant helps you to deploy your CICS applications in a service requester setting.
Creating a web service using tooling
Instead of using the web services assistant JCL, you can use IBM® Developer for Z or write your own Java program to create the required files in CICS.
Creating your own XML-aware web service applications
If you decide not to use the CICS-supplied data mappings, you can write your own XML-aware data applications in two ways instead. You can either use the XML-ONLY parameter on DFHWS2LS or you can write your own application without using any of the tooling. Using the XML-ONLY parameter is the most straightforward way to configure the CICS pipeline process to pass the XML data to the application to be handled.
Using Java with web services
You can use Java to create web service applications. Different techniques are used to create these applications compared with the techniques used with other programming languages.
Validating SOAP messages
When you use the CICS web services you can specify that the SOAP messages are to be validated to ensure that they conform to the schema that is contained in the web service description. You can validate both provider and requester mode applications.
Handling invalid and uninitialized application-supplied data
How to tolerate invalid data that is found during transformation between JSON and application data.

Parent topic: Developing applications