CICS TG plug-in for the CICS Explorer – V2.0 available
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.
Revitalizing your CICS seminar – Hursley comes to North America
There are two really great CICS seminars coming up at the start of March, if you can get to Boston, Massachusetts (March 2nd) or Palisades, New York (March 4th).
So why are they so great? Well let’s just skip over the fact that they are free full-day seminars for the moment. They are also being taught by the IBM Hursley UK lab team, so you can be sure you are going to be in the hands of the experts (infact I see that CICS Distinguished Engineer Ian Mitchell will be one of the main speakers at the seminar, which is about as good as it gets). The seminar is based around the new CICS TS V4.1 release and won’t just be covering the new functionality in the new release but will also be showing you how to extract real value from your CICS regions.
The seminar is split into 3 sessions:
- Revitalizing Business
- Revitalizing Applications
- Simplifying your IT Environment
This is a seminar that is going to introduce you to what I consider to be the most consumable CICS Transaction Server to date. Part of this is about taking your existing assets and very quickly extracting new value without having to change them. The data inside your CICS regions is now more accessible and readily available than ever before, helping your business to be much more pro-active, flexible and adaptable to new opportunities and challenges that may come your way. To help you get there even faster, the CICS tools are there to help analyze and configure your CICS regions so those opportunities and challenges can be identified with ease.
There is a huge amount of new functionality in CICS TS V4.1, from the CICS Explorer, Event Processing, Atom support, SCA and a whole lot more. If you want to find out how to take advantage, then register for the seminar today so you don’t miss out. These are just the first two dates scheduled, look out for more seminars in April!
Full information on the seminar and registration can be found here:
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/info/lmi/cics/index.html
There is also a little more information in the PDF for the seminar here:
2010 Revitalizing your CICS
New samples for trying out Atom feeds
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 TS 4.1 WLM performance demo
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.
Tip on deleting content from an information center
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.
New infocenter downloads available for z/OS
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.
New Redbook on the uses of events and Web 2.0 technologies
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.
India CICS Developer Conferences 2009
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
GSE UK conference – let’s chat!
This Wednesday, sees the start of the Guide Share Europe (GSE) UK conference and I’m going to be there along with quite a few other IBM Hursley employees from the CICS team. Assuming there is reasonable internet at the venue, I’m hoping to take some time to blog about the event while I’m there. I’m hoping to get chatting with a quite a few of you as well while I am there so if you want to meet-up for a chat, please get in touch via the blog or on twitter (@chrishodgins), I’ll try to check both as much as I can during the conference. Other than that I should be lurking around at most of the CICS presentations.
The conference has a nice varied agenda covering 9 different streams so there should be lots to take in! The streams are:
- CICS
- IMS
- DB2
- Enterprise Security
- MQ
- Large Systems Working Group
- Network Management Working Group
- Software Asset Management
- New Technologies
I only managed to convince one other sucker colleague from the CICS team to join me for a mugshot on the blog to make it easier to track us down. So without further ado, keep your eyes peeled for one lanky Scotsman (that’s me – left) and Kevin Bowkett (on the right).
Chris Hodgins
Kevin Bowkett
Kevin is a first line manager for CICS with responsibility for Web Services, SCA, Web 2.0 and Java. He has the pleasure of taking the first CICS presentation on Wednesday morning, which is the CICS TS 4.1 overview. This is definitely one to catch so you have a nice grounding for the rest of the CICS presentations over the 2 days.
On the Thursday afternoon, I’ll be presenting on CICS Explorer aka “The new face of CICS”. So please feel free to grab me at any time or after the presentation to have a chat about it. I’m primarily a CICSPlex SM developer and lately one of the main developers on the CICS Management Client Interface. So if you need to get your head around any of that lot you know where I am. I’m happy to talk about anything else CICS related as well.
Both Kevin and myself will be about on Wednesday and Thursday. So see you there!
| CICS | IMS | DB2 | Enterprise Security | MQ | Large Systems Working Group | Network Management Working Group | Software Asset Management | New Technologies |
UK Student Mainframe contest
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 
.
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