I sat with my client on a major service orientation project as IBM presented their updates to CICS. My client is a few versions behind (could actually find no compelling reason to bother to upgrade) on their mainframe and wanted to review if IBM’s added capabilities would offer any abilities the project could utilize. IBM’s CICS support for web services is well known by now. Their CICS updates keep the web service support up to the latest WSDL – SOAP – and WS-* standards. If you need or want to expose COBOL programs as a web service (and this can be valuable to allow older applications to be partially utilized as transaction engines in their area of expertise) IBM’s keeping the capabilities in line. IBM has also continued to expand a large variety of internal CICS capabilities. This was a major time warp for me as CICS command line functions, com areas and linkage sections, and various transaction batch and script coding abilities are so dated. As an...
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