Setting up an application

Applications are one of the key capabilities of cloud-enabling CICS® Transaction Server for z/OS®. The large set of resources that makes up a business application within CICS can be logically defined as a single entity and deployed on a platform as a single resource.

1. Design the application, considering what application entry points, policies, and resources that you want to deploy as part of the application.
   For more information, see Designing an application for cloud enablement.
2. In CICS Explorer, create CICS bundles to contain the application resources application entry points dependencies,and any CICS policies relating to the application.
   For more information, see Defining CICS bundles.
3. In CICS Explorer, create an application project to define the application bundle.
   The application bundle references the required CICS bundles. For more information, see Packaging CICS applications for deployment in a cloud environment.
4. In CICS Explorer, create an application binding project to describe the deployment rules for the application to a region type in a platform.
5. From CICS Explorer, export the application project, the application binding project, and the CICS bundles to zFS.
   The export process exports the files to the platform home directory in zFS in the applications, bindings, and bundles subdirectories. For more information, see Deploying an application to a platform.
6. In CICS Explorer, create an application definition.
   The application definition is aCICSPlex® SM APPLDEF resource definition, which points to the application bundle and the application binding in the platform home directory for the platform where the application runs. For more information, see Deploying an application to a platform.
7. In CICS Explorer, install the application to a platform.
   CICSPlex SM uses the information in the application bundle and the application binding to install the CICS bundles that make up the application into all of the target CICS regions in the platform. In each region, the resources that are specified in the bundles are dynamically created and CICS checks that any resources that are specified as dependencies are present. For more information, see Deploying an application to a platform.
8. In CICS Explorer, make the application available for users to start through the available application entry points. For more information, see Managing applications.