The Master Terminal

I came across the Bitsavers.org site the other day which is trying to save copies of old documentation for mainframe and minicomputer based systems. Stashed away is a PDF scan of the CICS/VS Version 1 Release 3 Introduction to Program Logic Manual dated 1977. It is quite surprising how relevant lots of it still is.

There are lots of other “vintage” (?) IBM mainframe manuals out on Bitsavers if you want to have a nostalgic moment…

Grant

Corneel Booysen has raised some interesting thoughts on his blog about COBOL and whether or not it is killing CICS. Being classed in the “you young ones” category I hope I can perhaps offer a slightly different perspective, so I’ll take a stab at replying.

As a young developer, I have to say I’m pretty language neutral. I don’t really care what language I’m programming in and I’m smart enough to know that no language is perfect. What I love is innovating and creating smart solutions. How I get there is largely immaterial. Generally I will just try and choose the right tool for the job. With CICS I have quite a few choices and all of them have their own uses.

Any young developer worth their salt will pick up enough to get started with COBOL within a day to a week. Certainly reading the code isn’t going to cause too many problems, assuming your code is of reasonable quality of course.

Corneel mentions “the guy in the cubicle next to you created a new web application comprising of several class libraries using his favorite scripting language, deployed it then created a blog entry and proceeded to read up on the latest technology trends before lunch – while you were compiling for the seventh time…”. Well last time I looked you could use things like URIMAPS and DOCTEMPLATES to build a fairly sweet model-view-controller style web application. You don’t even need to download any libraries! Sure you might have to compile your application a few times but I promise you with some of the great new tooling available like RDz v7.1 the code-compile cycle is almost eliminated.

I actually believe the problem isn’t related to any particular skill shortage but a more general lack of bright young graduates that are interested in working with some of the most exciting hardware around; the mainframe. So how can we fix this? Well IBM is already putting a lot of effort into the Academic Initiative as well as developing and hosting the Mainframe Challenge. There also has to be a push from CICS customers all over the world to start marketing jobs aimed a new graduates that include basic training on the mainframe. Approaching universities and asking them if they could provide courses on COBOL and mainframes in general would also help.

I am constantly reading about skills shortages around CICS and the mainframe and yet rarely I see the community standing up and shouting about how they NEED young developers. The reason that CICS feels old is simply because the community has let itself feel old. I have another blog post coming entitled “Where are all the CICS rockstars?” but that is a question for another day. For the moment though think about this. You are not too old, you are experienced. The younger generation are not about to take your jobs any time soon so relax and enjoy having us around. We can’t match your experience and all we have in our pockets are youth and enthusiasm. You don’t have to be young to be enthusiastic and you don’t have to be young to be innovative. We are down here looking up at you waiting for you to pass on your knowledge but if all we get back is resentment then we are not going to hang around for long. One of my colleagues in our excellent service team once said to me after I had thanked him for passing on some of his knowledge to me, “Helping you, helps keep me in a job.” He understood that as long as there was energy, skills and knowledge around the product there would always be a place for him. Smart guy!

So help us to build the community. Get blogging, get networking and tell the IBM CICS team what we can do to help you. Remember that us “young ones” have feelings and all we need is a little encouragement to help us and you shine. The future of CICS is in YOUR hands so stand up and be counted as the leading innovators and experts that you are.

Impact 2008 is coming to a close tomorrow and I have to say I met some really nice people out here in Vegas and several on twitter.  I ran two presentations on CICSPlex SM workload management (a basics and an advanced session) and both sessions were followed by some good questions I thought I would share the answers to. I’ve also added in some questions from the Tech Zone. Thanks to everyone who attended the presentations!

I have two equal LPARs but CICSPlex SM workload balancing only routes to one of them?

This is a really common question that we get asked a lot. The answer is that CICSPlex SM workload balancing does not actually round-robin the workload across all available target regions. What it does do is try to route to the best available region at all times.  This is commonly the region we routed to last time.  Once that region starts to become heavily loaded CICSPlex SM will begin to route work away into a different region.

Another potential factor here is the utilization of routing regions. CICSPlex SM will always try to route locally if possible, as remote routing goes through slower links. So if you are constantly using the routing regions on LPAR1 you will find that the target regions on LPAR1 are the most frequently used.

Can I associate a routing region with more than one workload?

No. This also means that if you are considering switching to distributed routing from dynamic routing you should be careful that your target regions also do not appear in more than one workload.  When you switch to distributed routing, your target regions need to be able to route as well (i.e. a requesting region). So these new requesting regions can also only be associated with one workload at a time.

Does CICSPlex SM work out the affinities for me?

No. This is a bit of a manual task I’m afraid, although the excellent CICS Interdependency Analyzer is certainly able to help you detect them. The aim over a period of time should be to make sure no new applications are created with affinities without good reason. Work should also be done on the current affinities to see if their lifetime could be reduced or if the affinity could be removed all together.

Is it possible to move a Maintenance Point (MP) CMAS from LPAR1 to LPAR2 if for instance LPAR1 goes down?

Yes, this is possible.  Simply bring the MP CMAS up in LPAR2 without any changes. Note that although it is possible to rename your maintenance point, this is a lot more tricky.

That’s your lot for the moment. If you have other questions you would like to know the answer to then feel free to add them to the new “Ask a question” section available from the top navigation.

On Monday this week, the Impact 2008 CICS Q&A session with CICS director Dave Andrews kicked off. What follows is a brief summary of what happened in-case you missed it.

The session started by looking at how you could make the most out of the Impact event. We have 60 sessions dedicated to CICS this year. With CICS Tech Zones where you can meet the experts and discuss any problems or just come for a chat. CICS is also represented at the Solutions Center with Nick Garrod and John Knutson. Also at the Solutions Center is the new z10 mainframe out in all of its glory along with plenty of vendor stalls.

The demo suite also received a mention with demos available for CICS tools and PD tools. Well worth a visit to get some hands-on time with some of the latest tooling. A sign-up is required so speak to John Knutson who will sort it all out for you.

There is also a CICS Spotlight session on Wednesday (today) at 6pm in the Marquee Suite, with free drinks and snacks.

We were also pointed at the CICS e-Newsletter as an excellent way of keeping up with the latest updates in the CICS world. It has monthly updates of offerings, new members of staff and marketing updates.

The main message was to make the most out of it. Discuss your requirements with IBM… talk to us! Engage with our experts, try out our products and tools and sign up for the beta program. By joining the beta program not only do you get early insight into the product and gain that essential competitive advantage, you can also help to shape the final product by providing essential customer feedback.

The next big section was product updates. Dave started with a disclaimer that all of this was not set in stone. The main points were that IBM is driving for smart SOA architecture. You should not be frightented of the new technologies, embrace them! A lot of the value of CICS is not about creating brand new applications (although that is definitely happening) but creating new solutions using the new functionality to provide added value to those existing applications. CICS is translating it’s core values into value for you.

We then looked at the CICS time-line focusing in on what is now available for CICS TS 3.2. We saw that CICS TS 3.2 had an enriched base, provides a web based interface into CICS and huge improvements to Java and SOA. Where are you going to put your critical applications, well CICS provides availability and robustness already. We have a steady migration to CICS TS Version 3 and the fastest migration to any CICS release yet! Come and talk to us and let us explain why this is happening.

Dave then talked about the major CICS TS 3.2 themes of Application Connectivity, Application Reuse and Service management.

The extensive beta program was again mentioned. Dave said that we get great feedback from it and it’s a great opportunity to let customers get the skills early and take a competitive advantage. It’s also a good opportunity to get an early look at any of the updated books that are available. The open beta that ran in March 2006 had over 100 participants! The adoption rate for 3.2 is incredibly high and the beta program is helping drive real quality with great reference customers.

We then went on to look at the CICS customer references and what they were getting out of CICS.

Allianz Dresdner
- Improved performance for Java
- Impressed with Web interfaces to CICSPlex SM

Vestigo
- Improved Java application support
- Shared Java classes between WAS and CICS

University of Florida
- Web services enablement of student course systems
- CICS was lowest cost of ownership

Moving on we looked at some of the other CICS news. Upgrades for Service Flow Feature and Rational Developer for Z. We looked at what news was coming up. New Java 5 support, Web Services data binding for XML and AnyType, improved interoperability with CICS and WAS v6.1 supporting the CSI v2 Client Auth mechanism, Web Services MTOM support over MO transport and the withdrawal of support for CICS TS v2.3 effective September 30th 2009.

One of the interesting revelations that came next was a look at the most downloaded redbooks. The list below shows a fairly interesting trend shift towards CICS Web Services and Java.
- Implementing CICS Web services
- Application develiopment for CICS Web services
- Architechting access to CICS within an SOA
- Java Application dev for CICS
- Threadsafe considerations for CICS

Dave then went on to talk about some of the CICS complementary tools. There was some brief amusement as someone asked if complementary tooling means that they are free. Dave was quick to point out that complimentary means that it complements the product and is not in fact free.

The first tool on the list was RDz v7.1. It was suggested that this was definitely worth a look… its going to get better and better! I’ve personally played with it recently and it looks very nice! Dave concluded by saying that it was going to be very important for the future of CICS application development.

Dave gave a brief overview of the CICS Tools and PDTools explaining how customers can use these to help manage their CICS environment. He used CICS IA as an example of a Tool that can assist with making applications Threadsafe and hence getting increased response time and lower CPU usage. The other tools have similar roles in helping with Application Lifecycle, Performance, Data Management and Operational Management.

We then moved on to TX Series v6.2 and mentioned updates were the removal of DCE, for improved simplicity of install and setup, a re-engineered core and a new system management console. Dave also talked about when you might want to use TX Series. Great for a departmental server in shops who understand the value of CICS.

Finally we moved on to CICS Transaction Gateway v7.1 and mentioned it’s improved debugging support. A lot more was mentioned but I’m afraid I was distracted at this point. I’ll try and find out what was discussed later.

Now for the fun stuff. CICS Future Directions. So the BIG message is that the future runs on System Z! There are also no new CICS annoucements at this time, due to the big refresh on tooling last year. The interval for CICS releases continues to be 18-24 months. You can keep up with the latest action through the beta programs and the e-Newsletters.

We looked at the CICS strategy and goals. Dave highlighted Share as one of the great places to gather customer feedback.
- The aim is to position CICS and the mainframe as preferred platform for Enterprise Level Transaction Processing. If there are holes in what we have then please tell us!
- Support non-disruptive adoption of new technologies to support innovation and agile business needs.
- Minimise specialist skills required to install, operate and develop new and exiting applications.
- Respond to key customer and market requirements.

We then moved on to talk about Enterprise level TP. Keeping the traditional focus on performance, scalability, availability, security and management. Promoting the strengths of COBOL and championing it for it’s strengths. A question was asked about whether universities are going to do anything about this? The answer was that we are working closely with the universities at the moment to promote this type of thing.

So moving on to look at the adoption of new technologies. One of these is event processing for CICS. This has huge potential for CICS and can also be provided non-disruptively. Next on the list was PHP and we are currently playing with using it for things like as a scripting language for SFF. Also big on the list was Web 2.0. If you read this blog regularly you would have seen mention of the CICS Atom SupportPac. Again this can help us provide you with more non-disruptive extra functionality for your existing applications.

We then looked at things that were being done to deal with some of the skilling problems around today. Some of the solutions CICS is pursuing are minimising specialist skills, working heavily with universities, and interestingly working on a degree level module with one of the universities on enterprise transaction management. Also getting students up to speed with the enterprise by running mainframe competitions and bringing the winners into the labs. A suggestion that customers should get in touch with the local universities and ask for the skills they need.

Dave finished the session by introducing a move towards Rich Client Platforms based on successful CICS IA user interface. If you are at Impact 2008 you should be able to get a demo of this. There is a strategy to move away from green screens, heading for the Rich Client Platform.

I will be putting up a couple of write-ups from yesterdays CICS Q&A sessions at Impact later on today but in the mean-time if you are looking to connect with people at Impact 2008 this year may I recommend to you a micro-blogging web tool I use called twitter. There are quite a few people already at Impact that are using this to document their day and to keep in touch with others throughout the conference.

If you do decide to sign-up, then do say hello, you might also want to add your username to the comments below so others can get in touch with you. You can find my tweets here: http://twitter.com/chrishodgins

Give it a try and if you hate it then at least you tried but you might find it changes the way you network for good!

Update:

If you want to follow most of the Impact 2008 tweets you can do so here.

http://hashtags.org/tag/impact2008/

If you want your tweets to appear there as well then simply include #impact2008 somewhere within your tweet.  You will also need to follow @hashtags for your tags to be read.

SupportPac CA8K, released on 20 March 2008, shows you how to introduce some of the very latest Web technologies into your CICS TS system. The primary technology it demonstrates is how to create an Atom feed from existing CICS data, such as a Temporary Storage queue. The purpose of the SupportPac is to show that this can be done today, using existing CICS facilities. So it uses the funky new URIMAP and PIPELINE resources to map Atom feed request URLs into CICS resources that you want to publish. In its simplest form, this means that if you want to publish some data into a feed, all that your application needs to do is write the data on to a TS queue, and then let the SupportPac code do the heavy lifting of the Atom protocol.

Now you might have thought that PIPELINE definitions were only for use by SOAP and Web Services, but that’s not strictly true. You can also configure a pipeline to execute an arbitrary program as a message handler for any protocol, and that’s just what this SupportPac does to handle Atom. But it also uses the pipeline’s XML configuration file to provide some of the Atom metadata, and to help you to specify exactly which CICS resource you want to publish, and how its data is laid out.

If you want to publish CICS data that is not in a CICS TS queue, the SupportPac lets you do that, too. It can link to a program that you provide, which can extract data from wherever it likes – from your database manager, for instance – and return it in a container for insertion into the feed. There is a sample program that demonstrates using the sample FILEA file that is distributed with CICS.

Once you can deliver stuff into an Atom feed, it’s then fairly easy to request it from a Web browser using Ajax technology, and the SupportPac also includes some JavaScript to help you to do this. This could lead you on to develop mashups that incorporate CICS data, but the SupportPac doesn’t go that far.

The SupportPac doesn’t only let you request data from CICS, it also lets you manipulate it using a REST interaction style. So, as well as using the HTTP GET method to request TS queue items, you can use the POST, PUT, and DELETE methods to create, update and destroy them as well. The ability to use all four of these methods in a pipeline request did show up a CICS problem, so you have to apply the fix for PK58721 before using the SupportPac.

Starting Monday, the CICS Tech Zones are kicking off. These are basically just a an excuse to stop by for an informal chat. You should have a listing of all the Tech Zones in your registration pack.

I’m going to be at two of the CICS Tech Zones this year, so if you want to come along for a chat about anything CICSPlex SM related or just for a chat about the blog please do stop by.

If you want to say hello I’ll be there Monday 15:45 – 17:00 and on Thursday 10:30 – 11:45.  These are local Vegas times.

Hope to see you there!

Update: The times specified are local to Vegas. Thanks Kevin.

Thanks to Corneel Booysen for being the first brave CICS blogger to let us list his blog here. Corneel is the driving force behind the CICS Wiki.

Check out his blog here:
http://www.cicsworld.com/blog/2

WebSphere Impact 2008 is coming up in April this year and there are numerous CICS Technical Tracks available.

I’ll be presenting a couple of the tracks this year so if you are planning on attending the event please come over and have a chat if you spot me. I’ll be posting updates and photos throughout the conference and perhaps one or two meet-up times if you want to come chat to me and any other unsuspecting CICS developers I drag along.

Look forward to meeting up with you all and stay tuned for updates throughout the conference!