The Master Terminal

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 .

CICS TS 2.3 goes out of support today … unless you have arranged an extended support contract!.

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

CICS IA 3.1 has been announced today, see here for details.

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.

While we’re not expecting people to camp out in front of IBM, like they do for the latest new phone/gadget, today is the day that CICS TS 4.1 hits the ’streets’.

CICS Explorer is also available for download here: CICS TS V4 or CICS TS V3. You will need an IBMID to get to the downloads, but if you don’t have one, you can register via these links.

A new updated version of CICS Links is now available.  Inside you will find links to IBM redbooks, white papers, case studies, web casts and a whole lot more.

You can find the presentation in PDF format here:

ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/software/htp/cics/presentations/CICS_TS_in_your_SOA_-_Links_-_Issue_4.pdf

Thanks to Andrew Bates for continuing to keep us all up to date with latest information!

The IBM CICS team is busy working on CICS Transaction Server for z/OS Version 4 Release 1 and you can read a preview about this upcoming release in this Preview announcement letter.

A couple of videos are available:

Technical Overview:

Business Value:

If you have any questions, go over to the I ♥ CICS facebook group, or collar one of the CICS team attending Share, or add a comment to this post.

CICS offers support for PHP:

There is now a SupportPac (CA1S) available for download that allows PHP scripting capabilities. By offering PHP on CICS Transaction Server Version 3.2, CICS is providing another option for opening up yet more of your enterprise CICS application to simple HTTP access from a diverse range of service requesters.

The SupportPac complements an earlier offering SupportPac CA8K, which provides the capability to deliver CICS data as Atom Feeds. You can use the PHP scripting language capabilities in CA1S, which are shared with WebSphere sMash, to extend the range of CICS assets that can be exposed as REST services. For more information click here. There is a short 8 minute demo of the capabilities and potential of combining CICS, Atom feeds, PHP scripting and Smash for a mashup – you can view it here.

CICS Support for events:

CICS has the potential to be a prolific producer of business events and with the recent SupportPac CB11, CICS TS v3 can produce events for consumption by WebSphere Business Events (WBE). This SupportPac provides an example of emission of events from CICS TS for z/OS. It allows the user to start identifying the places in processing within CICS applications where significant business events occur, and to see how the power of WebSphere Business Events (WBE) can be harnessed to carry out correlation and pattern matching on these events. For further information please click here.

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.