CICS and JSON web services

There are several ways to get started with JSON web services in CICS®. The most appropriate way for you depends on how much you already know and how advanced your plans are for using web services.

CICS supports several different technologies for exposing resources as JSON based services. This section relates to an older technology called JSON web services.

Note: IBM's premiere technology for RESTful APIs that use JSON message formats is z/OS® Connect Enterprise Edition. It is broadly compatible with CICS JSON web services, but offers many additional integration options and capabilities. To learn more about z/OS Connect Enterprise Edition, see z/OS Connect Enterprise Edition product documentation.

JSON web services is a technology for enabling CICS programs as JSON services. These may be RESTful services, or request-response remote-procedure-call style services. The technology is derived from that used for SOAP web services and uses JCL procedures called DFHLS2JS and DFHJS2LS that are used to generate WSBind files. These WSBind files are deployed into CICS as WEBSERVICE resources. The WEBSERVICE resources facilitate automatic conversions between JSON and application binary data formats.

Here are some starting points for JSON web services in CICS:

Get familiar with Concepts of JSON web services and Concepts of RESTful JSON web services.
Plan for the deployment of an application as a service provider.
You might already know enough about how you will use web services in CICS to start planning your applications and the related infrastructure.
If you want a hands-on way to learn about web services in CICS, CICS provides an example of a catalog management application, which you can enable as a JSON web service provider. To do this, use DFHLS2JS to generate a web service from the language structures provided. You could use a web browser or third party client application to test the JSON web service. For more information, see Creating a service provider application from a data structure.
The example application is described in The CICS catalog manager example application.