Designing and Programming CICS Applications

Together with the COBOL programming language, IBM's CICS (Customer Information Control System) has formed the most common set of tools for building customer transaction applications in the world of large enterprise mainframe computing. CICS is used by 470 of the Fortune 500 companies to process 20 billion transactions a day. Written by John Horswill & Members of the CICS Development Team at IBM Hursley, Designing And Programming CICS Applications introduces new users of IBM's mainframe (OS/390) to CICS features. Experienced users will learn how to integrate existing mainframe systems with newer technologies, including the Web, CORBA, Java, CICS clients, and Visual Basic; as well as how to link MQSeries and CICS. Whether developers have thousands of terminals or a client/server environment with workstations and LANs exploiting modern technology such as graphical interfaces or multimedia, Designing And Programming CICS Applications gives them the power to create, modernize, and extend CICS applications. A CD-ROM is included.

For many companies, large or small, the mission-critical applications run in the CICS environment. The difficulty of opening up those business logic and data for access through web interface often comes from the fact that the mainframe programmers don't know much about the web technology while the new web guys usually know little about CICS. This book bridges the gap between the two camps, and provides step-by-step instruction on how to apply and integrate the different technologies including Java, MQSeries, etc. This book is a must-read for anyone responsible integrating CICS and web interface. The only drawback is that this book focuses on OS/390, while there are many CICS applications running in other platforms such as OS/2.