Join our experts, Ray Jones, Vice President, IBM System z® Software, and Kevin Stoodley, IBM Fellow and CTO for Enterprise Modernization Tools, Compilers and Security, to learn how IBM’s latest compilers, middleware and tools can help you stay on the technology curve. In this complimentary webcast, Ray and Kevin will discuss best practices and approaches to plan and execute a successful compiler migration, alongside CICS®, IMS™ and DB2® upgrades. They will also go over IBM’s strategy for compilers and tools on System z to help you better plan your overall development and upgrade efforts.

Register now for this webcast by logging onto http://ibm.com/software/systemz/webcast/15feb.

Join us after the webcast for a live question-and-answer session. The webcast will also be available for replay after the event.

If you have a solution to add to this list, please drop an email to cicsetp@uk.ibm.com.

The initial micro-project in the series was designed to build up the core skills with CICS and a number of other technologies. Most of the team had little experience with CICS at the start of the project The micro-project, named by the graduates as “NextGENAPP”, was to take an insurance company’s existing COBOL terminal interface application and enhance it using some of the new features of CICS to create a new web user interface that surpassed the consumability of the terminal interface. The application they were given was GENAPP, a dummy application that enables users to access and edit information in a DB2 database on customers and their policies. The graduates had to use a number of technologies including CICS, Rational Developer for system z, Rational Team Concert, AJAX/DOJO, WebSphere sMash, Groovy, and many more to produce the new interface.

Existing 3270 GENAPP

New login page

Customer search panel

With the first micro project now complete, the graduates have shared their thoughts on how the project progressed for them, the CICS learning curve, and their view on why CICS will remain at the forefront of transaction processing in the years to come.

Michael Jones 

When I joined IBM in August 2010,I had never heard of CICS or worked with it. Within IBM I work for the CICS Transaction Gateway build team, in this role though I have interacted indirectly with CICS, I haven’t had any experience working with it.

Starting the project I had a lot to learn about what CICS actually did, let alone how to use it. Since I was leading the team I wanted to quickly get to speed with how CICS worked, so turned to the info-centres and online resources. In both cases I was presented with a great number of acronyms and a great deal of jargon.

For me this was the main barrier for working with CICS. When you first start, resource names like ‘pipeline’ don’t give you much of a hint as to what job it actually performs. It can also be quite difficult to find basic information about such things inside the info-centres. Though once you get working with parts of CICS it often becomes quite obvious what they, and you quickly realise how useful it is. Looking past all the terminology there really are a lot of handy and easy to use features in CICS.

One of the things that impressed me was the flexibility of CICS. As part of the first task we set up a web interface to a legacy application. Once we learnt the process it was very easy to repeat, and one of the great things about it was we didn’t have to learn any COBOL to do this.

Overall working with CICS so far has been an interesting experience. A lot of the concepts and ways are working are new to me, but I can quite easily see why they’re done the way they are, and look forward to learning more about CICS as we go along.

Mark Richards

I had a rude awakening when I started in May last year, straight into CICS Level 3 Service. University education doesn’t seem to cover z/OS, z/VM, COBOL, Green Screen terminals, mainframe assembler, or XEDIT. However, I guess they were right that Java works everywhere. Nine months later I find myself in this project and the only one with regular CICS experience. How could Mike and James catch up with what I’d learned and did I know enough? Turns out that you don’t need to know CICS to expose web services, just enough to do the task: A couple of RDz wizards, two CICS commands (CEMT INQUIRE and CEDA DISPLAY) and the RDz Remote Systems view seemed to be enough.

Looking back, I didn’t think it would be as simple as it ended up! I’d played with using DFHLS2WS in JCL to get web services running before and was a little shocked to find the ease with which we could do it in RDz (once we learned how!).

With RTC we could fire work items between the two teams to get web services defined, installed, modified, tested and added to the site. At full speed in the backend we could expose a new web service every 10-15 minutes and once done the client team found the auto-generated Java components pending to enter their development environments.
Seeing how this works demonstrated something I’d not really seen before; the ease with which you could develop a new frontend for an enterprise encapsulated application and not really know how the rest works. We didn’t need to know CICS APIs, Systems Programming, database structures or enterprise programming principles. However, we did have to customise the COBOL copybooks, but even that was easy.

James Bartlett

I started as a graduate at IBM in July of 2010. My degree was in Maths and Philosophy and my experience of computer science consists of an introductory course to z/OS and z architecture, followed by a year working in a role supporting a proprietary test system and various other resources used in CICS testing. My knowledge of the inner workings of CICS is cursory at best, or was, although I have a reasonable understanding of the mainframe. My role in the team was initially to assist Mike and Mark in exposing the programs constituting our legacy application as web services, and on that subject I don’t have much to say that they haven’t covered.

I also undertook the migration of our web front end from external hosting on WebSphere sMashash to hosting in CICS itself using the sMash implementation provided by the CICS Dynamic Scripting Feature Pack. The exercise was not without its challenges, but I was on the whole pleasantly surprised by how easy the process was. The installation of the feature cap is very straightforward, there being little more to it than copying the zipped up feature pack to Unix System Services, unpacking it and creating a couple of datasets to contain the resources to be used by CICS. The whole process is clearly and thoroughly documented on IBM’s Information Center, and this was little more than painting by numbers.

The installation in CICS was a little less straightforward, and as such a bit more interesting as an education. Again the documentation was good, but writing the JCL to update and then clone and expand our CSD (which filled up the first time I attempted the update, took a bit of trial and error. Updating our CICS region took a bit of effort also, but at least here I had the JCL written and just needed to add and edit as per instructions. This done, there was little more left to achieve other than to drop our application into USS, edit the dependencies and set it going.

Domanic Smith-Jones and Alexander Woodgate

We wrote the website that would consume the web services exposed by the back end team. We both joined IBM in September 2010 and started this project with little CICS experience between us. Now we are at the end of phase one, we still don’t have much CICS knowledge! The website uses a mixture of HTML, CSS and DOJO to provide a dynamic web application front end and Groovy to call the back end web services on CICS. The CICS program may have been written in COBOL but once they have been exposed as SOAP web services we don’t have to worry about how it all works in the back end. We simply needed to set relevant fields for the operation we were performing and then send the soap message off to CICS, we didn’t need to understand commareas or channels. The web application was all developed using a local sMash server that we ran on our laptops enabling us to run the site and make changes to it live to test the implementation of the calls we used and the forms that we created to use them.

The DOJO enabled us to create simple methods that allowed data verification before the data was sent to CICS. This again required little knowledge of CICS beyond the sizes and types of fields that were to be sent, which were all stated in the java classes created by the back end team.

The real power of web services was that we could consume them from a whole host of technologies, we may have hosted a website on CICS using the dynamic scripting feature pack but there was nothing that limited us to that. We can host our site on other platforms and web servers, or we can take a completely different approach and consume them from a native desktop or mobile application.

Amy Ferrell

I joined IBM Hursley in September 2010 as an information developer on CICS TS. Having an ID background meant that I understood much of the terminology of CICS, I have however never really used it. My main work on this project has been on the showcase and documentation, though I have completed a small amount of work on the web user interface. I worked closely with other members in the team to write the documentation for the new GENAPP application, and put together a short media clip to explain to non-technical users how the power of web services can be used to provide real business value.

To me, CICS is vast and seems incredibly daunting as a graduate when faced with building applications and using the mainframe. The project was a really good introduction to some of the technologies that the people who interact directly with CICS must use. I was really surprised when I learned that the WUI that we created in just 2 months of part time work (including our education) could connect hundreds of users with CICS and provide the capability to process tens of thousands of transactions per day. When I think of the capabilities of a typical website versus one similar to ours which is linked into CICS, it is easy to understand why IBM customers continue to rely on CICS for their day to day business functions, especially mission critical functions: it’s the incredible scalability and reliability of CICS TS coupled with the security and versatility that it offers our customers. In the next few micro-projects, I’m really looking forward to being more hands on with coding to see what we as a team are capable of even though we’re not the most experienced CICS users.

A new tool has just been added to the CICS portfolio. The all shiny and new CICS Deployment Assistant. Congratulations to Grant and everyone else involved on releasing a great new tool!

CICS Deployment Assistant can discover, model, visualize, and deploy new and existing CICS regions, using automation and policy-driven advice built on your own and IBM’s knowledge and experience, giving you access to the latest IBM CICS technology faster and easier than ever before.

Two interesting new APAR (CICS APAR PM15583 and CICSPlex SM APAR PM15214) have also been released for CICS TS V4.1. When applied together, they provide access to the cold-start CICS SIT parameters via the CICSPlex SM API and the CICS Management Client Interface (CMCI). They will allow you to find out not only what value each regions SIT parameters were set to but also where they were set. Very handy for problem determination or just keeping track of your environment.

If you read z/Journal you may have spotted CICSPlex SM developer Dave Williams 3 excellent articles:

• An Implementation Fast Path for CICSPlex SM
• CICS Task History Recording
• CICS Sysplex Optimized Workload Routing

You might notice there are some new sharing options on the blog now as well. At the bottom of every post you should now be able to simply click a button to share the post to twitter or Facebook.

Finally, a new blog focussing on WebSphere and CICS support has also just been created over on developerWorks. I’ve also added the blog to our bookmarks below.

Posted on behalf of Nick.

The Tom Rosamilia and Phil Weintraub ‘Ask z Experts’ session was very well attended – below you can see Mr Zemblowski and Catherine Moxey center back row, Steve next to the linen-suited dapper Mr O’Dowd.

Phil W appears to be taking council from Anthony O’Dowd – no doubt asking why, if the Message Broker can handle scoring at events like Wimbledon and the Ryder Cup why can’t we use it to resolve the integration of a hung Parliament in the UK.

Meanwhile is looks like Tom R is praying that our very own Em James knows the answer.

Looks like Sue has found her badge at last – hope she kept hold of her passport! You don’t want to lose your passport while on a business trip…..

Now look who our intrepid explorers have run in to – our real live genuine CICS Explorer Joe Winchester!

That’s just about it now, flights home on Saturday and back to Hursley next week – must start work on that hit single now we’ve absorbed some American culture.

Posted on behalf of Nick.

Our intrepid CICS Explorers have been checking out the Super Woman’s Reception – I think Tom was expecting lycra and super powers.

While they were there they bumped in to Yvonne Perkins, VP for Enterprise Platform Systems (EPS) who wished to pass their Best of British wishes to her.

After all the socialising it was time to hit the bar and a glass of red, room temperature of course.

Many people you see here are walking around with colourful buttons adorning them (click the image for a close-up).

I must say I liked the Connectivity Cowboy one, although cannot claim any input to that particular badge, but here are the ‘sacks’ of badges waiting to be taken up.

Now it was time to scope out the food – so we went for a closer look.

Then it was off to play the machines.

Some people lose their shirt gambling, this chap lost his head by the look of it!

But Tom and Sue decided to see what they could get with their winnings- is Ford country some kind of music?

Obviously someone got upset because the next thing we know is Security arrived….

We just hope they let us out in time for tomorrows sessions, particularly Phil Wakelins security talk which will include the new feature recently made available for CICS TS V4.1, ID Propagation. Also, what should be an entertaining session from Will Yates – Old stager Vs Greenhorn and a look at how the CICS Explorer can help and for those of you who missed Fraser’s Dynamic Scripting session there’s a repeat!

Posted on behalf of Nick.

So after the excitement of day one and the 200+ attendees to Dave Andrews opening, our intrepid CICS Explorers get down in to the more detailed technical sessions.  To back up the technical sessions, as well as the Ask z Expert sessions, there are demo’s being provided in the IBM System z Software Solutions Suite.

After a quick chat with the CICS Business Partner Supremo, Diane Johnson (@dianegjohnson), it was off to the solution center to see what freebies there were check out all the rich complementary products to the CICS family.

First stop was the Hostbridge stand (doing more with CICS) – nice comfy chair and check out that guitar behind us – looks like a ’57 Les Paul to me

Next we visited those fine people who used to be called Fair Isaac, now known as FICO.

Now with all the new stuff CICS keeps putting in to it’s products it gets increasingly hard to stay up to date with it all, so it’s important that we have companies offering education and instruction of how to take advantage.

So after a hard day around the event it was time for our Explorers to put their feet? up. The ideal solution to this was to relax in one of the bars.

We spent some time analysing what was on offer for Day 3 and saw Catherine Moxey was giving her CICS Events pitch, Fraser had a couple of sessions on CICS Web Services and Service Component Architecture as well as the exciting new announcement from CICS, a session on Dynamic Scripting, there’s an ILOG session from Matt Whitbourne (@mattwhitbourne) and Dan Donnelly as well as further education on CICS Events and implementation.However,  in addition to this there is the Tom Rosamilia session at 16:30 Creating an Agile, Dynamic and Cost-Effective Business With System z. and the ‘Ask z Experts 18:00 session with Tom and Phil Weintraub. Another full day ahead – in the words of that classic Greek philosopher, or was he Roman? Actually I think it the Magic Roundabout…. Zebedee “time for bed….”

]]> http://themasterterminal.com/2010/05/06/impact-socks-on-day-2/feed/ 0 chrishodgins solutions_suite diane_johnson hostbridge fico mainframe_training bar bar_closed http://themasterterminal.com/2010/05/04/impact-socks/ http://themasterterminal.com/2010/05/04/impact-socks/#comments Tue, 04 May 2010 22:51:14 +0000 Chris Hodgins http://themasterterminal.com/?p=771 ]]>

I’ve been asked to publish this by Nick, who is just too nice to say no to. No socks were harmed (so far) during the creation of this content but I can assure you they will be given a good talking to when they return from their err.. adventures.

So having shamelessly plugged Impact 2010 on YouTube promo video here we are at Impact 2010 in Las Vegas, Nevada. The Venetian Hotel is the setting for most of the sessions and two stars of the Impact promotional videos have taken some time out to give a narrative of the first days proceedings. Sue and Tom have flown over from the Hursley Lab in the UK to be present at this years event along with several others speakers and attendees from the SW Lab in England. Dave Andrews, the CICS Development Director kicked off the CICS Track with a family update, featuring two key announcements made last week. The CICS Transaction Gateway V8 and CICS Dynamic Scripting no-charge feature pack.

Sue and Tom also heard about the exciting new Redbook that is available ‘Smarter Banking with CICS Transaction Server and were seen ‘mugging’ up on the book.

Next up it was time for food.

After lunch it was time to take the Solution tour.

Where upon we came across a nice bright shiny z10 – it’s big it’s black, the mainframes back!!

After that they decided to venture off and investigate the experts.

Here we found the resident CICS Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM), Catherine Moxey.

There’s plenty going on here and for Tuesday we have Joe Winchester talking about the CICS Explorer and how it can be extended using the software development kit, Steve Zemblowski talking about upgrading your CICS TS, Catherine (when she’s not in the experts zone) talking about CICS Events, Dan Donnelly talking about ILOG Business Rules solutions and a couple of CICS Tools sessions, one featuring Jim White from Southern California Edison. So before the jet lag kicks in any further it’s off for some rest. 

Since I started in CICS almost 5 years ago (has it been that long already!) I’ve always just accepted that if I’d forgotten to activate my VTAM applids before I brought a CICS region up, the quickest course of action was just to activate my applids and restart CICS. Now, I had always just assumed that there was a better way of doing that but there was always something else more important to worry about. So, no idea what we were discussing at the time, but somehow Grant managed to slip the solution to this one into our conversation. Now I am sure this is just the most obvious thing in the world to most of our readers but I thought I’d share the solution anyway.

So the problem, you bring up CICS and you spot in the JESYSMSG log:

DFHSI1592  XXXXXXXX CICS applid not (yet) active to VTAM.               
DFHSI1572  XXXXXXXX Unable to OPEN VTAM ACB - RC=00000008, ACB Code=5A.

You utter an unrepeatable curse (just loud enough so that the colleague next to you raises his head, but not so loud that the sysprog overhears you and starts revoking your privileges) and dig out that SDSF command for activating your applids. Or if you are not the sysprogs drinking buddy, submit a ticket or offer baked goods, liquid refreshments or anything else that might be accepted as payment in kind.

Now normally, this is where I would kill/cancel/purge bring my CICS region gracefully to it knees and restart so everything comes back up and CICS successfully re-opens my VTAM ACB. Now, however armed with our new-found solution, we can simply just go to our SDSF panel and run the command:

/f <CICS region jobname>,cemt set vtam open

Marvelous eh! Now depending on your setup, you are now:

1. Annoyed that you read all the way down the post just to find out something that obvious
2. Celebrating this wonderful insight and are off to tell all your CICS friends how wonderful the blog is
3. Once again uttering unrepeatable curses at your 3270 emulator

For those who are experiencing 1 or 2. Thanks for reading!

For those now cursing, please read on. I’m assuming you just received the following message on SDSF:

+DFHAC2015  XXXXXXXX Console <userid> has not been defined to CICS. Input is ignored.

To be able to communicate with CICS from SDSF, you need to install a terminal into the CICS region with the CONSNAME attribute set to that of your TSO userid. You can find out a little more on how to define this here:

https://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/cicsts/v4r1/topic/com.ibm.cics.ts.resourcedefinition.doc/terminals/dfha23q.html

Remember to add your terminal definition into one of the lists defined on the GRPLIST SIT parameter on your CICS region so it actually gets installed. Sadly, this is one of those problems that can only be solved if you have already created the required definitions. With your trusty terminal now added, you should be safe to repeat the steps above. If all goes well you should see something like:

RESPONSE=XXXX                                              
 +                                                         
 Openstatus( Open )                                      
 Pstype(Snps)                                            
 Psdinterval( 000000 )                                   
 Grstatus(              )                                
 Grname()                                                
 NORMAL                                                  
 RESPONSE: NORMAL TIME: XX.XX.XX  DATE: XX/XX/XX         
 SYSID=XXXX APPLID=XXXXXXXX

Version 2.0 can be used to independently view status of multiple Gateway daemons (z/OS or Multiplatforms) and does not require a connection to a CICS TS 4.1 region, or CICSPlex SM, as was the case in version 1.0.

What’s new in version 2.0

• This latest version of the SupportPac provides the following new or revised views:
  • CICS Transaction Gateway Explorer view
  • Gateway daemons view
  • CICS connections view
  • Console view
• Other features are a customizable Resource column layout for Gateway daemons, CICS connections and Property views, and support for CICS Transaction Gateway for Multiplatforms.

Note: CS05 V2.0 requires CICS Explorer Version 1.0.0.5, which is available to all existing CICS TS V3 and CICS TS V4 license holders.

Please refer to the link above for further details.