It has been a bit quiet here on the posting front lately…. No excuses really, but I’ll make one anyway…. We have all been working hard on CICS TS 4.2 which was announced yesterday. You can read the announcement letter here.

If you want to have a play with CICS TS 4.2, an Open Beta program is running, for details and to sign up go here.

Any questions on CICS TS 4.2, feel free to post them as comments to this append, and we can try our best to answer them for you.

Oh, and if you want to check out the Beta CICS TS 4.2 Information Center, check it out here.

• CN0A – Application Performance Analyzer
• CN0D – Debug Tool
• CN0F – Fault Analyzer

You will need the corresponding versions of the z/OS component to use the plugins, but if you have them and CICS Explorer, you are good to go.

Note: these plugins currently require the Windows version of CICS Explorer.

Any questions, or comments on these SupportPacs ask here, or over on Developerworks.

IBM System z Software Webcast

Webcast April 21, 2010, 11:00 EDT*** Please note EDT Timing ***

Smarter banking with CICS TS V4.1

The industry and analyst studies are piling up and they all arrive at the same conclusion:

Aligning business and IT efforts can double the productivity gains of those efforts done individually. This alignment also enables businesses to deliver the right information in the right context, tailored to individual needs. But redesigning decades of existing code and solutions is not a viable approach to process improvement. How do you approach building a successful and scalable smarter banking initiative non-invasively?

From an organizational perspective, the enterprise needs horizontal visibility as well as appropriate skills to manage the business and IT operational environments. From a technological perspective, the enterprise needs a platform that will scale with the success of the bank, as well as continuously ensure the integrity and reliability of business processes and services. Providing end-to-end process visibility on a high-performance horizontal transaction processing platform will be a key differentiator for successful enterprises in their drive toward smarter banking.

Join us for this complimentary webcast to learn how IBM CICS® Transaction Server V4.1 can deliver the highly scalable agile infrastructure transaction processing fundamentals needed, along with advanced capabilities like business event emission, and ATOM feeds as a great starting point toward providing a solid foundation for the future.

In this session, we will discuss how CICS TS V4.1 and complementary WebSphere® solutions support smarter banking by helping you:

• Gain insight into business processes and respond by modifying key business applications quickly and with confidence
• Comply with corporate, industry and government policies to manage business risk of critical business applications
• Control costs by simplifying IT infrastructure and improving development and operational productivity through easier-to-use interfaces and functions

Register now for this webcast here.

Speakers:

• Claus T. Jensen, Senior Technical Staff Member and Chief Architect, Architectural Synergies and Lifecycles, IBM Software Group
• Alison Lucas, CICS TS Communications Software Developer, IBM Software Group

Broadcast date: April 21, 2010, 11 a.m., EDT

Developed for: IT and enterprise architects, IT managers, and industry solutions analysts and managers

Technical level: Intermediate

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

India CICS Developers Conference 2009 - Chennai

The second conference based in Bangalore, will start on December the 10th. If you hurry, you might still have time to register. (Note that this link will only be available until the end of the week).

Also launched was the India CICS User Group developerworks space. If you want to find out more, go here and get involved.

Dave arrived last week and spent some time before the conference with his TXSeries team in IBM Bangalore. If you want to see part of the team responsible for producing and supporting TXSeries, here you can see them all in an all-hands meeting with Dave:

TXSeries Team in Bangalore

If you are reading this blog you are probably working somewhere that uses IBM mainframes and may be interested in helping to ensure that university students have had a taste of the mainframe (or -sorry Chris – proper computing as I call it).

So if you or your organisation has relationships with UK universities, then please make sure that they are aware of the upcoming UK Student Mainframe Contest. This is a really good way for UK university students to learn about System z.

If students participate and they get through the early challenges they will get their mitts on CICS and other z/OS software… Though the chance of winning a Sony Playstation 3 might be more of an incentive than getting first hand use of CICS .

CICSPlex SM Web User Interface users, should not have this problem as the TCPIPSERVICE used for CMCI users is automatically created with settings appropriate for the environment, but if you are an SMSS (‘single server’) user, and have configured your own TCPIPSERVICE, perhaps using the IBM supplied group (DFH£WU) as a model, then if the CICS is running with SEC=YES, then you need to update the TCPIPSERVICE used by the CMCI so that it specifies Authenticate(Basic):

If you do NOT run with Basic authentication on the TCPIPSERVICE used by the CMCI, your userid/password credentials will not be checked by CICS and the requests that are run in the CICS via the CMCI / CICS Explorer will be associated with the CICS default user.

I am about to out myself here, but I like to use Mac OS X.

There I said it. But please don’t hold it against me!

I also like to use CICS Explorer, so that means I have a dilemma… Because, officially, the supported CICS Explorer platforms are:

• Microsoft Windows Vista
• Microsoft Windows XP (32-bit)
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and 2008 (32-bit)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux V5 (Intel®) (32-bit)

Mac OS X is missing from that list!

If you are prepared to run with an unsupported environment for CICS Explorer, it is possible to get CICS Explorer running on Mac OS X. That is the aim of this post.

First you need to download an Eclipse 3.4.2 (AKA Ganymede SR2) distribution from the Eclipse site here. Do NOT download the later 3.5 code. I picked the Mac Carbon 32bit Eclipse IDE for Java Developers as my Eclipse installation.

After Downloading this tar file, using Finder I extracted the downloaded file ‘eclipse-java-ganymede-SR2-macosx-carbon.tar’ by double clicking on it. This left me with an ‘eclipse’ folder in Finder.

Open the ‘eclipse’ folder and launch the Eclipse application:

Click Open to run the internet downloaded application. You will then be prompted for your workplace:

Click OK to use the default, and in a few moments (The first Eclipse startup is a little longer than normal) the Eclipse ‘Welcome’ page will appear:

Now before we carry on with Eclipse, we need one more part – The CICS Explorer SDK. Don’t worry, you don’t need to do any compiling, and you don’t need to be planning on developing a CICS Explorer based app, for now we are just going to get a running client. So back on your web browser go the the CICS Explorer Downloads page.

Now depending on whether you are a CICS TS V3 or CICS TS V4 licensee pick the appropriate link.

Once you have signed on and agreed to the T&C’s you should get to a download screen. The file you want to download is the SDK, for example:

You will probably get an applet warning if you’ve decided to download with the IBM Download Directory. Either follow the dialog, or you can download using http if you prefer.

In any case what you should be left with is a zip file called something like cicstsv41_explorer_sdk_v1002.zip. What is really really important is that you do NOT unzip this file.

If you used an http download (rather than download director) your web browser may have unzipped the file for you. If this is the case, look in your trash and drag the zip file back into your download directory. You can delete the unzipped version.

Now we have the CICS Explorer SDK handy, it is time to go back to Eclipse. Click Help on the Menu bar and select the ‘Software Updates…’ menu item e.g.:’

The ‘Software Updates and Add-ons’ window will open:

Select the ‘Available Software’ button:

We now need to reference the zip file we downloaded. To do this we need to add a ‘site’, so click the ‘Add Site…’ button:

The type of site we want to add is an archive – we have a zip file after all – so click the ‘Archive….’ button. A file open dialog box will open, so navigate to the SDK .zip file we just downloaded:

That little bit of navigation should have filled in the ‘Location:’ box:

Now click ‘OK’ to add the new site.

You should now find that the ‘site’ you just added is in the ‘Available Software’ and it should have expanded out a list of items under ‘Uncategorised’ (sic – sorry I am sitting in England as I write this, so it’s getting spelt the ‘proper’ way ). Select the check box next to the ‘jar:file’ entry for the sdk .zip and all the subcomponents should be auto-magically selected:

Now click on the ‘Install…’ button. A dialog box should pop up showing progress of a dependancy check, but when that is done, you’ll get a confirmation window:

Click ‘Finish’ to process the install. A status dialog will be displayed:

When it is done, you will get an Eclipse restart prompt:

Click ‘Yes’ to allow the restart and Eclipse will restart itself. You’ll get the workplace confirmation dialog again, just click ‘OK’ and when it’s finished you’ll get the Overview window:

Click the curved arrow icon (see above screenshot for location) to go the workbench. Being a devout Assembler / COBOL programmer, I get nervous being in a Java IDE, so get to a ‘normal’ CICS Explorer view, we need to switch perspectives. From the menu, pick Window->Open Perspective->Other …

A perspective picker window will open:

Select ‘CICS SM’ and click OK. The CICS SM perspective will now be displayed:

Now all you have to do is create a connection and you are on your way …. Select Eclipse->Preferences from the menu:

Now select ‘Connections’ from the left had side of the window, and you can now create the connection for CICS Explorer to use:

If you were just installing the CICS Explorer SDK into an Eclipse installation on another platforms, the steps listed here would pretty much be exactly the same as this.

Granted, it is a bit more involved that unzipping a file, but for me the little bit of hassle was worth it so I can keep using my preferred platform. However all of this does show one of the benefits of a tool like CICS Explorer being build using Java and Eclipse technology.

Just a reminder, that although it all seems to work (at least for me), Mac OS X is not an officially IBM supported platform for CICS Explorer. If it works for you great, if it doesn’t let us know over on the developerworks forum. Please do not contact normal IBM support with problems running in an unsupported platform like this. If you do you may be asked to demonstrate the problem in a supported environment…

Because the CICSPlex SM API model is used for the CMCI, and the SMSS (Single Server), this means that if you are a CICS TS 4.1 user, then once you have installed the PTFs for PK90112 (UK50340,UK50319,UK50341) and upgraded CICS Explorer to 1.0.0.2, you will be able to work with definitions in the CSD. This will work if you are using CICSPlex SM or the SMSS capabilities of the CMCI.

How does it work?

In the ‘CICSplex Repositories’ tab within CICS Explorer, if you have a CICSplex selected, then the CICS resources selected from the Administration menu will show CICSPlex SM BAS resources, for example:

BAS definition

To work with a CSD resource, you need to select a CICS from the ‘CICSplex Repositories’ tab:

CSD definition

Check out the “What’s new in version 1.0.0.2″ within CICS Explorer for more details, and for details on the CMCI / CICSPlex SM API changes, see the DOC ++HOLD on the PTFs.

If you have any questions about the CSD support in CICS Explorer, please fire away over on Developerworks. If you have questions are on using the CMCI or CICSPlex SM API with the CSD support, feel free to ask away here…

Note that this CSD support is only available for CICS TS 4.1 systems, it is not available for earlier releases, even if they are managed by CICSPlex SM 4.1.

You probably don’t need a reminder, but there is a nice shiny new release over here in the form of CICS TS 4.1

So what is new in CICS IA 3.1 ?

• CICS TS V4.1 support
• CICS Explorer plugin
• Command Flow
• Natural/Adabas support
• Concurrent Dependency and Affinity data collection
• … and lots more

CICS IA 3.1 is planned to be available on Friday the 4th of September.