In the fall of 2012, I had the opportunity to return to the United Kingdom after 36 years. My initial visits were very quick, since the United States Navy would only allow you on shore for a short period. Nevertheless, my thoughts of the UK were still centered around the days of King Arthur ...leading up to the James Bond 007 era. Then there was my remembrance of William Shakespeare, the greatest poet and playwright ever and William Wilberforce, an English politician and philanthropist that led the movement to abolish the slave trade and most... [More]
Mother's Day weekend is always a great opportunity to honor Mom and perform a host of chores around her house. This particular weekend, Mom required her house to be painted and as a good son should, I responded ,"Let's Git-R-Done " ...as Larry the Cable Guy would say. To begin, I saw Mom break-out the paint and a couple of paint brushes. Immediately, it dawned on me how Mom would pull out paint brushes when I was a small lad to teach and discipline me to pay attention to details. Well, not this time, I went to the local... [More]
On Friday June 14 we GAed z/OS Explorer V2.1 and CICS Explorer V5.1.1, that is to say, they became generally available for download. That wasn't all - we also made our new repository of compatible plug-ins available, with plug-ins for five CICS Tools, five IBM Problem Determination Tools, IBM Data Studio, Rational Team Concert, a 90-day trial version of Rational developer for System z.
I've been the marketing manager for CICS Explorer, and more recently, z/OS Explorer, for over five years now, so I obviously have an... [More]
CICS PA Plugin (Targeted thinking)
In the latest version of the CICS PA plug-in we have attempted to bring a new approach to CICS performance monitoring and assessment. Traditionally users of CICS Performance Analyzer are performance system experts who have honed their skills over many years and have evolved a wealth of knowledge of keeping their CICS systems well balanced and ways of spotting problems before they have a detrimental affect to overall system performance.
We are currently distilling this knowledge and experience into... [More]
Writing RESTful web services using a CICS Liberty JVM server - Part 1
My name is Daniel Fitzgerald, I'm a trainee software developer in the CICS team based at IBM Hursley UK. I've been working for the last six months on the Mobile Extensions Feature Pack V1.0 for CICS Transaction Server. As part of the project we looked at using JAX-RS, JSON and RESTful designs within Liberty. This article, coming in two parts is the result of these investigations.
The CICS Liberty server is a... [More]
Writing RESTful web services using a CICS Liberty JVM server - Part 2
My name is Daniel Fitzgerald, I'm a trainee software developer in the CICS team based at IBM Hursley UK. I've been working for the last six months on the Mobile Extensions Feature Pack V1.0 for CICS Transaction Server. As part of the project we looked at using JAX-RS, JSON and RESTful designs within Liberty.
[Edit: This article was updated 11 September 2013 by Mark Cocker to clarify the pre-requisites and update the... [More]
Hidden in the release notes for the latest CICS Explorer V5.1.1 you will see an enhancement that provides the “Ability to edit a CICS Platform project, CICS Application project, or CICS Application Binding project”. The required server-side APAR PM81540 is now available.
These new editors are a significant improvement to the user experience of working with CICS Applications, CICS Bindings and CICS Platforms so if you are interesting in the cloud enablement capability in CICS TS V5.1 please try out... [More]
In CICS TS V5.1 we introduced Policy . This is a set of one or more rules each setting a threshold for resource consumption and specifying an action to be taken when it’s exceeded. You can set limits on CPU consumption and storage use as well as DB2 and VSAM file accesses. The actions CICS can take are to issue a message, abend the task or emit a system event . The last action allows you create or extend automation to perhaps send an email or SMS when an application starts behaving badly.
Electronic mail has become an effective form of communication widely used in our private lives and dealings with businesses, governments, and other organizations. For example customers now expect confirmation and status of orders, account alerts, and availability of statements to be sent within minutes via email. Email strikes a balance between the expense and delay of physical post, and the more immediate but temporary nature of SMS.
As many of today's transactions are hosted in CICS Transaction Server (CICS), it is not surprising... [More]
Some of you will have seen me present this picture as part of how I explain our objectives for the new Application and Platform capabilities being created in Version 5 of CICS TS. These two concepts are major foundations for our move to enable to faster and simpler deployments - as valuable outcomes in the strategic Cloud initiative.
I typically start by explaining that this is definitely a vision of the future - we're at the start of a journey to a time when this sort of scenario may be business-as-usual, but it we don't start... [More]
When we talk to customers about z/OS Explorer and CICS Explorer we get a lot of positive vibes. There's talk of how it can help their teams, how it can simplify some of their tasks, and sometimes how they want to extend it with plug-ins they already use.
When we get onto discussing how it can be deployed to their teams, the concepts sound good in theory but we've seen that people of get confused, in practice. This is compounded because of the large number of ways it can be installed (to cater for the difference needs of different... [More]
Over the past five years the CICS Transaction Gateway team have released a number of SupportPacs to support the development of applications calling CICS using CICS TG APIs. This post provides a summary of these SupportPacs, including detail on the evolution of the API for .NET Framework-based applications.
Click the links to the specific SupportPacs to find further detail and API documentation.
CA5F: IBM CICS TG 'gateway' intercept plug-in support
A number of our users create special perspectives tailored to their company, or workflow, pulling together the critical set of views for their situation. For a single user, it's simple enough to customize the perspective and save it using the Window > Save Perspective As... menu, but it's difficult to share these between users. The correct way to share perspectives between users is by Eclipse's extensibility features.
As an example, we're going to create a CICS Web Hosting Perspective that shows the information needed... [More]
This article shows how the IBM Health Center can be easily installed into the CICS Explorer and used to create customized perspectives for monitoring CICS JVM servers. Together these two tools provide a powerful platform for profiling CICS Java applications, monitoring memory usage and garbage collection, and performing further diagnostic commands .
To follow the setup in this article you will require the following minimum software requirements:
CICS TS for z/OS V4.2 or later
IBM Java... [More]
The Announcement Letter for the CICS TS V5.2 open beta says that “Lifecycle management of first-class applications, introduced in CICS TS V5.1, now supports multiple installed versions of applications.” What is this new capability, how does it work , and why should you be interested?
In CICS TS V5.1 we introduced the application resource with a nice long 64-character name and a proper version. So rather than just borrowing characters from an 8 character CICS resource definition name , it was... [More]