The Master Terminal

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….”

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. 

Everyone has things in their lives that annoy them but instead of working on a solution, they just live with it because they either haven’t thought about it or the workaround is quick enough that it doesn’t really matter that much.

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.

Read more…

The latest release of the CICS TG plug-in for CICS Explorer is now GENERALLY AVAILABLE here:
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=1083&uid=swg24022354

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.

If you have any interest in CICSPlex SM Workload Management (WLM) on CICS you should go check out this new YouTube video now! I’ll leave the video description itself to explain the contents.

This nine minute demo by Dave Williams of CICS Development in Hursley, UK demonstrates some of the performance improvements made in CICS TS V4.1 when using the new Sysplex Optimized WLM function. Throughputs for similar workloads are compared between CICS TS V3.2 and CICS TS V4.1 with Sysplex Optimized WLM switched on and off.

Just to give a little extra background, Dave was the chief developer and does an excellent job here of clearly describing the new improvements.

A slight confession, I wrote the tool the video uses to analyse and chart the workloads. It is an internal IBM test tool, so you can’t get your hands on it, but if you would like to know more or you think it would be useful to you, let me know.

If you are interested in seeing more videos like this, direct from the development team, add a comment, with maybe a sentence or two about what you would like to hear about.

Notes

• For more details on Sysplex Optimized WLM see here.
• Dave used the term ‘Base table’ in the clip. A ‘Base Table’ is more commonly known as a Resource Table. The new table Dave referred to is WLMATARG.
• The tests performed here show an artificial workload running 10,000 transactions using the Distributed Routing mechanism. The results you achieve with your workloads in your environments may differ.

I recently had a query from a colleague about updating his locally installed information center. He had updated it to include more recent versions of documentation and deleted the old JAR files and directories. However, the information center was corrupted when it restarted. So why does this happen and how do you fix it?

When you start an information center, Eclipse caches the navigation and when you search it creates indexes and stores these for future use. This helps with performance, particularly in a large information center like CICS. When you add new content, these caches are updated automatically for you to add new navigation entries and search indexes. However, if you delete content, the caches are not updated which can lead to unexpected results or the “corruption” experienced by my colleague.

To fix the problem:

1) Shut down your information center using the help_end.bat file
2) Delete the ibm_help\eclispe\workspace directory
3) Delete the directories in the ibm_help\eclipse\configuration directory but not the config.ini file.
4) Restart the information center using the help_start.bat fle

When Eclipse restarts, it creates a new cache for the navigation and will recreate the search indexes on your first search.

We have just published two new downloads on the IBM Publications Center for the CICS TS 4.1 and 3.2 information centers. These downloads run the infocenter on z/OS for the relevant release and contain the latest CICS TS, CICS TG, and tooling information. Both use the latest Eclipse code, which fixes the problems with viewing PDFs.

If you’re interested, the number for the CICS TS 3.2 infocenter on z/OS is SK4T-2656-00. The number for the CICS TS 4.1 infocenter on z/OS is SK4T-2654-00. The download is a zip file which contains a readme and a JAR file. The installation is much simpler – the JAR file contains the configured infocenter.  You still need to edit the start script to point to your Java installation and provide a port number.  Other than that though, you don’t need to do any other configuration (no copying plug-ins etc). The prereq is Java 6.

If you’re interested in the new features of CICS TS V4.1, and are looking for examples of their use in real life scenarios, then you might be interested in a new Redbook we’re writing in sunny Montpellier. Its title is “Smarter Banking with CICS” (probably). While it is aimed primarily at the banking industry, it will include example uses of events and Web 2.0 technologies with CICS to show how these could be used within an existing CICS system. Watch this space for more information (or follow its progress on Twitter).

To whet your appetite, here’s what will probably be the preface:

It goes without saying that 2009 was a year of unprecedented change in global banking. The challenges that financial institutions are facing require them to cut costs, but also to regain trust and improve the service that they provide to an increasingly sophisticated and demanding set of customers.

In the past, siloed and rigid IT systems have often inhibited banks in their attempts to re-engineer their business processes. IBM’s Smarter Banking initiative highlights how more intelligent software can be used to significantly improve the end-to-end integration of banking processes.

This IBM Redbook aims to show how software technologies like SOA, Web 2.0 and event driven architectures, can be used to implement Smarter Banking solutions. Our focus is on CICS Transaction Server which is at the heart of most bank’s corebanking implementations.

The first part of the Redbook is aimed at business leaders, it introduces Smarter Banking, provides an overview the IBM Banking Industry Framework, and then illustrates the value proposition with a set of Smarter Banking business scenarios.

In the second part of the book we address the bank’s technical leaders by providing an overview of the key technologies and describing how CICS supports these technologies today.
IBM’s SmartBank showcase is used in the final part of the book to illustrate how we enabled business event processing and Web 2.0 technologies in the SmartBank environment, in a non-invasive way without changes to the applications.

• We show how we enabled the CICS corebanking system to emit events for large transactions. We also show how these events are consumed by WebSphere Business Events which is configured to take a pre-defined action when a certain pattern of events occurs.

• We also show how the CICS corebanking data, such as account transaction information, can be exposed as a mashable Web 2.0 feed so that the account holder has instant access to the recent transaction history.

It is hoped that this IBM Redbook will help you to take the first steps toward Smarter Banking with CICS.