• 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.

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.

The practical upshot of this is that you can now easily write and deploy .NET applications which can take advantage of the unique qualities of service you get from running CICS TG on z/OS. This is certainly something we have been asked for by many clients over the last year or so. It’s also worth pointing out that this is a category 3 SupportPac, which means that it is also supported by IBM.

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.

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.