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IBM CICS Transaction Server for z/OS 5.6, 6.1, and 6.2 are updated (October 2024)

News


Abstract

Details are provided of continuous delivery updates to IBM® CICS® Transaction Server for z/OS® (CICS TS) 5.6, 6.1, and 6.2.

Content

CICS Transaction Server for z/OS overview

Planned availability

  • October 28, 2024: Majority of continuous delivery (CD) enhancements
  • December 31, 2024: Remainder of CD enhancements

IBM CICS Transaction Server for z/OS (CICS TS) is a world-class, secure and scalable platform for hosting transactional enterprise applications in a hybrid architecture.

In addition to the CICS TS 6.2 features available as part of general availability in June 2024, the following new features are now available:
 
  • Developer productivity
    • Support for Jakarta® EE 10 and Spring Boot® 3

      Developers are now able to use the latest features in Jakarta EE 10 and Spring Boot 3 programming models to build modern and lightweight applications with optimized access to CICS programs, services, and data in VSAM, IBM Db2®, IBM IMS and IBM MQ. This support is included in CICS TS 6.2, and now also available in CICS TS 6.1 with APAR PH60795.

    • Improved experience defining CICS resources in Gradle and Maven projects

      CICS Explorer users are now able to right-click on a Gradle or Maven project and use wizards to create bundle parts, for example policies or FILE definitions. This support is available in CICS Explorer 5.5.38 by performing an update or downloading from Install Eclipse Tools.

    • CICS TS resource builder available as a container image

      The CICS TS resource builder is a command line tool to facilitate configuration as code for CICS resources. It enables developers to easily define CICS resources in a readable source format (YAML) and store, build, and deploy together with the application in a pipeline. The CICS TS resource builder is now available as a container image to simplify the download, verify, and install experience using familiar docker tools. Details on how to get started using the container image for CICS TS resource builder will be made available in the IBM documentation.

  • Security
    • Security definition validation for CICS TS

      When application developers change a CICS application it can be unclear if this also requires a change to the security configuration. For example, a READ FILE command is changed to update a VSAM record and now requires update authority to the file. If the update authority request is not caught by automated testing this can lead to failures in production.

      Security definition validation is an approach that identifies and verifies an application's security definition requirements by using a combination of the security definition capture (SDC) capability provided in CICS TS 6.2, automation testing, and a CI/CD pipeline. The pipeline prepares the CICS region using SDC, coordinates with automated tests, and then extracts an audit of the applications' security definition requirements. This audit is compared to those of previous versions of the application to highlight differences that require approval. The source code manager can block the change request from being merged until approval is obtained from a security administrator.

      The following tools are provided to enable users to adopt security definition validation:

      • Galasa SDV Manager

        Galasa is an open source deep integration test framework designed for agile, reliable, and scalable testing across various technologies and platforms. The Galasa SDV Manager switches on SDC before tests are run, switches SDC off after tests are run, collects security metadata captured, then stores that data in the test artifacts.

        Available for download at https://galasa.dev/docs/managers/sdv-manager

      • Ansible scripts

        Scripts to compare captured security metadata against a previous baseline, and to create an approval process to change the security baseline, if security changes are found.

        Available for download at https://github.com/cicsdev/cics-security-sdv-samples/tree/main/ansible-sdv-pipeline

      • Approval bot

        A script to synchronize the status between the original CICS application code change request and the request to change the security baseline.

        Auto merges all change requests.

        Available for download at https://github.com/cicsdev/cics-security-sdv-samples

      Full documentation and a technical guide can be found at https://cicsdev.github.io/cics-security-sdv-samples/

  • Management
    • Policies with an action to issue a message now includes the system log as a destination

      CICS policies that have an action to issue a message to the CSSL destination will also send the message to the system console. This enables system automation products that monitor the CICS system console to take further action when these messages are issued. This enhancement is also available for CICS TS 6.1 and CICS TS 6.2 with APAR PH62711, and CICS TS 5.6 with APAR PH62710.

Planned availability

  • October 28, 2024: Majority of CD enhancements
  • December 31, 2024: Remainder of CD enhancements

Publications

Product documentation for CICS TS is hosted online in IBM Documentation. The documentation is refreshed regularly to reflect feedback from users, and includes changes that result from continuous delivery and IBM Service.

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Document Information

Modified date:
28 October 2024

UID

ibm17173582

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