What's new in CICS Transaction Gateway for Multiplatforms V9.2 and CICS Transaction Gateway Desktop Edition V9.2

CICS Intercept Plug-in

CICS TG now provides enhanced capabilities to facilitate continuous integration testing, adding the CICS Intercept plug-in (a user exit within the Gateway daemon component) as a complementary option to the existing Gateway Intercept plug-in (a user exit within the Java/JCA APIs). The plug-in can intercept ECI, EPI and ESI requests for any remote mode application, or JSON web service client, and allows selective pass-through to live CICS servers, or virtualized responses, when deploying CICS Transaction Gateway. For more information, see Configuring for application testing and CICS Intercept plug-in.

Additional platform support

In addition to SuSE and Red Hat distributions, CICS Transaction Gateway is now supported on the Ubuntu distribution for supported Intel hardware. Microsoft Windows 10 is also supported in this release.

For more information, see Supported software

CICS JEE Inbound Resource Adapter

CICS TG now provides an additional resource adapter - CICS JEE Inbound Resource Adapter, that provides the capability to allow TXSeries CICS Application to invoke J2EE Applications in global transaction under two phase commit protocol. CICS transactions residing in TXSeries can access J2EE applications by standard interfaces like EXEC CICS LINK. This capability is provided from CICS TG V9.2.0.1 onwards.

For more information, see CICS JEE Inbound Resource Adapter

Improved client response times over SSL connections to the Gateway daemon

CICS Transaction Gateway V9.2 delivers significant improvements in response time for remote client applications that establish a secure (TLS) connection, when many such remote clients simultaneously establish secure connections, or a large connection pool is established. This can be of assistance in start-of-business scenarios, or when entire connection pools are cycled for a planned or unplanned outage.

Container ccsid in request monitoring exits

In previous releases, request monitoring exits provided read-only access to the channel payload of an ECI request and response, but did not provide access to the CCSID that was used for encoding containers of type CHAR. CICS Transaction Gateway V9.2 provides access to the CCSID for CHAR type containers from request monitoring exits. This can be used in association with the Gateway Intercept or CICS Intercept plug-ins to recreate the data in a channel or container. For more information, see the getCCSID method descriptions in ChannelInfo and ContainerInfo. You can test these methods using the Java BasicMonitor request monitoring exit sample.

Running CICS Transaction Gateway on UNIX and Linux®

When running the ctgd command it is no longer necessary to define a ctgd.conf configuration file. If a configuration file is not defined, the ctgd command uses the values defined in the ctg.ini configuration file. The ctgd start command also creates a log file /var/cicscli/ctgd.log if it does not exist.

The default behaviour of Gateway daemon logging has changed to use the file destination. The default location for the log and trace files is now the /var/cicscli directory.

The default location of the configuration, log and trace files has moved from <install_path>/bin to /var/cicscli. For more information, see Changes to configuration files on UNIX and Linux

New sample EC04

A new sample COBOL program EC04, returns information in the COMMAREA about the CICS region where EC04 ran and how it was called. EC04 can be called from the Java EciB2 sample. For more information, see Sample CICS programs and maps.

Support for new users of CICS Transaction Gateway

The CICS TG Knowledge Center contains a new chapter, Getting started which shows a new user how to install, configure and run CICS Transaction Gateway on Windows and to run a sample application.