The Master Terminal

We’ve just shipped a new APAR, PM02187, which contains samples for setting up some simple Atom feeds. So if you’ve thought about trying out some of the Web 2.0 features in CICS 4.1 but not had a go yet, then this might be for you. The samples are based around creating an Atom feed from records on a temporary storage queue (there’s a program to populate a sample TS queue in the APAR) and from a VSAM file (the FILEA sample).  The samples are documented in the Scenarios section of the CICS 4.1 information center. Each scenario has step by step instructions and a demo.

We would be very interested to hear if you have some feedback on the APAR or on the scenarios and demos provided in the information center.

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.

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.