The Master Terminal

If you have been keeping an eye out on IBM_CICS you may have spotted a number of new SupportPacs that allow you to use various IBM PD Tools with CICS Explorer:

• 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.

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. 

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.

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…

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.

The first India CICS Developer Conference for 2009, based in Chennai, has just completed. Here we can see Dave Andrews (Director, CICS Products) during the opening keynote:

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