The Master Terminal

Well today is the day. It is time to lay CICS Transaction Server for z/OS Version 2 Release 2 to rest.

While our developer colleagues said goodbye to this release over six years ago, the IBM support and service teams have been providing support for CICS TS 2.2 (AKA CICS 620, CICSPlex SM 2.2, Pluto, 5697-E93 R200, HCI6200, HCP2200) since its GA date back on the 25th of January 2002.

Version 2 of CICS Transaction Server had a staged transition, with a short lived Version 2 Release 1, which was intended to introduce customers to the new Version. Release 1 was meant to get customers experienced/ready, before going into production with Release 2 and the exciting world of Java 2 V1.3.1, EJB 1.1, integrated translators, ECI over TCP/IP and lots more.

After today, a service extension will be required to get support on CICS Transaction Server Version 2 Release 2.

Just in case you are wondering, the date for end of service for CICS TS 2.3 is 30th September 2009, so you have less than 18 months to complete that migration to Version 3!

Leave a comment if there was something about 2.2 that you loved or hated…

The IBM supplied ‘Starter Set’ CICSPlex SM Web User Interface (WUI) views were originally created based on the TSO EUI screens when the CICSPlex SM WUI was being developed for CICSPlex SM 1.4 (CICS TS 1.3).

The original intention was that these views were just an initial set (almost like samples), to get customers up and running with the WUI. We expected that users could then customise the views to get the data that was important to them. However things haven’t quite worked out that way. We quickly realised that most customers do not want to maintain their own views.

When the development team are working on a new release and adding support in the WUI for new resources, there is a lot of debate on where items should appear on views. It is not an easy question to answer, too much information can be daunting, listing things alphabetically can cause issues due to the national language support that the product must provide. On the flip side, it can sometimes be a pain to find an attribute that you know exists on an object… somewhere. Likewise, because it is very subjective, changing a view, because we don’t like it for some reason, or to make a change that someone in the team considers an improvement, may cause customers to be annoyed as the attribute may not be where it was in the last release

If you are a CICSPlex SM WUI user, what annoys you about the IBM supplied viewsets? Is there a change that you apply to the viewsets each release, if so what are they? Add a comment and let us know.

While we can’t promise to make any changes based upon your comments, we can make sure that the development team are aware of them, so that they can perhaps avoid things that cause you frustration in future objects. If you are really lucky (again no promises), and the development team are making changes to that view for additional support, then they might be able to take your comment into consideration.

To get things started, my pet hate, is that the TASK tabular view does not show the tasks SuspendType and SuspendValue. I want to be able to sort and summarise on these fields, so I can see all the tasks waiting on temp storage related reasons. I also want these fields to hyperlink to a sensible view, e.g. if SUSPENDTYPE is a file control related suspend, then this field should be a hyperlink to a file related view, with a filter set to the filename of Suspendvalue.

Update: Corrected some grammar

When we started this blog it was in the hope that it would be a useful place for CICS users to interact a little more directly with the IBM CICS team.  So if you have any burning/intriguing questions you would like to know the answer to (no matter how bizarre) or any topic you would like us to talk more about then simply add it as comment to this post to let us know.  If you can truly stump us, I’ll personally send you one of the “I love CICS” stickers that are lying on my desk to make up for it. What a prize eh!  I only have a limited stash of them so get your questions in fast.

In case you missed a couple of recent announcements, new versions of CICS Transaction Gateway (7.1) and CICS Interdependancy Analyser (2.2) have been announced.

In a nutshell, CICS TG gets support for Containers (Commareas > 32Kb), Statistics support (that can be reported on by CICS PA 2.1 with the PTFs for APAR PK53163), IP interconnectivity support with CICS TS 3.2 (no need to use EXCI) and also some SSL and two-phase commit enhancements.

CICS IA gets a new Eclipse based client (IA Explorer), support for CICS TS 3.2 and Threadsafe reporting.

WebSphere Technical Exchange (WSTE) webcasts are scheduled web based conferences, where an IBM technical expert will typically demonstrate a products features, explain a function, diagnose problems etc.

WSTEs are free, but you do have to have register for the live WSTEs

Once the webcast is complete, there is normally a live Q&A with the WSTE presenter.

The upcoming schedule of WSTEs can be found here.

Previous WSTEs which you can replay are available here. These come in a varietly of formats, some are PDFs of the slides used for the webcast and possibly an associated MP3 file for audio, or you may need to register and you will be sent a link for the replay.

To just see the previous CICS related WSTEs try here.

Towards the end of last year we did some work on making some performance improvements to the CICSPlex SM API.

Most CICSPlex SM API commands (EXEC CPSM) will schedule an XDNR task to run in the CMAS that the MAS, or the batch job/TSO user is connected to. A number of these requests are very quick, so the overhead of CICS attaching and detaching the task compared to the processing actually performed by XDNR can be quite large.

APARs PK44521(CICSPlex SM 3.1) and PK51200(CICSPlex 3.2) have changed the XDNR processing so that these tasks can hang around for a short period of time and wait for more work. (Similar to the way CICS long running mirrors used to work.) If no work is received, the XDNR task will end, otherwise if the XDNRs keep getting work, they will stay running.

For heavy EXEC CPSM users, these changes can make worthwhile reductions in CMAS CPU usage and may improve the elapsed time of CICSPlex SM API programs.

Though of course as with all things performance related “results may vary”…..

Grant.

Industry analyst James Governor, has been blogging about Impact 2008 and he gives this blog a mention, so I thought we should return the favour. Another CICS blogger to add to the list. Thanks James.

Chris

<rant>

I hate the CICSPlex SM COBOL copybooks that IBM supplies for Resource Tables. Well maybe hate is a bit extreme, so how about strong dislike?

Now Chris will probably mutter something obscene into his Irn-Bru when he reads this, but I write CICSPlex SM API programs using COBOL…. I find it quick and easy to throw something together.

So what don’t I like about the copybooks?

Read more…

During Impact 2008, it was mentioned that perhaps CICS had forgotten its roots as it pushed towards SOA enlightenment. It was easy to see where this came from since Impact is a very SOA-focussed conference and we just released a whole ton of web-services functionality on our customers.

Personally, I see SOA as another opportunity for customers to take advantage of their existing assets. Rather than a move away from what we do, I see it as an embracement of current technology and using that to grab more value from the time and effort that customers have already invested into CICS. One thing that CICS director (Dave Andrews) mentioned numerous times during the CICS Q&A was that we were looking at non-disruptive technologies as a way to do just this. Hence all the focus around SOA, Atom feeds, CICS WEB interfaces and such like. There is a reason we are seeing some of our fastest adoption rates for the new release.

As I said previously, I may just be biased and I’ve only been at this a little under 3 years but that would be my take on it. I wouldn’t assume that because we are doing SOA, that we aren’t working our butts off improving, innovating and building on the traditional aspects of CICS TS 3.2 as well.

Chris

I was born 19 years after CICS, CICS is old enough to be my mother. I became aware of CICS about 2 years ago, though of course it had always been there, watching over me as I used an ATM for the first time or ordered that set of curtains, so pervasive in my life, and yet I never knew it…

Anyway, moving away from the “CICS is my estranged mother” metaphor; when I joined this department ten months ago everything was new. I had a little bit of experience with Assembler (I wrote a game of ‘pong’ using a z80, 8k RAM and 8k ROM- turns out Assembler 390 is not like this at all). Using green screens reminded me a bit of what I thought programming looked like before I actually did any, like in bad 1980’s hacker movies. My first week here is sort of blurry I remember my surprise that some applications are still using (or have ever used for that matter…) the F1- F12 keys and the confusion over that “Ctrl is now enter, and enter is return” thing. That took some getting used to. In fact, as someone whose programming experience is mainly from text editors and Eclipse, everything took some getting used to.

CICS is hard to get into, aside from the changes in the way your keyboard works, there’s the fact that it’s huge. There is so much to know; I think of it like that computer game, Age of Empires. I know about my bit, but everything around it is all blacked out, and I have to find out more about it by exploring. The exploring part is done by talking to people, this is what I really like about IBM. Everyone wants to help. Not only are my colleagues very smart, they are also very helpful, and if they don’t know the answer to my question they are also prepared to help me find someone who is. Being an Industrial Trainee in CICS is hard because a year is not enough time to explore enough of the map to be really good at anything, but its also great experience; I get to work on and contribute to a product that last year earned over $1 Billion, and I get to work with the leaders in the field.

Alice