CICS has undergone numerous and very major changes since the appearance CICS/ESA in the early 1990's. Easier problem investigation, less maintenance and more stability were all qualities that were attributed to the CICS/ESA product. Furthermore, numerous problems which existed in CICS V2 and V1 were corrected in CICS/ESA but, from a system programmer point of view, apart from having to look at dumps that are a little different, installing and supporting the product was more or less the same work. This is changing in CICS/TS and this is changing in a big way; this product can now perform true multi-tasking.

This course is meant to be a product overview; all new facilities will be discussed along with implementation tips and so on. It is also meant to be a review of the steps that must be taken when you migrate to this new CICS that is, what are the functions that have been made obsolete, what should you be worried about, what are the changes to the various programming interfaces that will have an impact on my production applications, etc. Finally, what can you do right now that will ease the migration of your CICS regions to this new platform.

Mainframe Training Audience

Anyone involved in the migration of applications to CICS/TS.

Mainframe Training Prerequisites

Instructor-led + exercises

Mainframe Training Course duration

4.5 days

Mainframe Training Course outline

Internal Architecture looks at domains, transaction execution, storage management, withdrawn functions and prerequisites. Control Tables Changes to control tables will be analyzed specifically in the areas of journal and log management, system initialization table, destination control tables, temporary storage table, BTS process types, ENQ models, TCPIPSERVICE, DB2 definitions, DJAR, CORBASERVER, REQUESTMODELS, URIMAP, PIPELINE, WEBSERVICE and HTML document templates Open Transaction Environment looks at the new environment supporting multi-tasking in CICS. New TCB's will be described along with new program attributes required to activate this environment Interfaces Describes the major interfaces in CICS/TS such as DBCTL, DB2 and SMSVSAM. Provides an overview of the new recovery process. Discuses new interfaces introduced in the latest CICS offering such as CORBA and IIOP, the modified CICS/WEB interface, JAVA Virtual machines and OO Interface to CICS services. Externals Changes to CICS-supplied transactions, utilities such as the Load Module scanner utility, monitoring, statistics will be covered. Initialization and shutdown procedures will be reviewed in light of the new logging procedures. Programming Interfaces Changes to the application programming, system programming, global user exit programming interfaces will all be looked at. Introduction of CHANNEL and CONTAINER; these are new programming constructs available to in CICS/TS 3.1. These new programming constructs are IBM's response to the problem about not being capable of transferring more than 32K worth of data between programs. eBusiness support Covers all facilities available within CICS to support programming of applications that have to operate on multiple platforms. Topics include CICS WEB Interface, SOAP, web services, XML parsing, CICS/TS web assistant, etc