IBM 3.1 manual of adoption, Increased integration of CICS applications, Web services support

•Enable you to create adapters to integrate business applications, providing effective reuse of existing assets. Consolidating integration activities in the host environment helps you reduce risk and complexity, as well as the cost of creating point-to-point integration solutions.

•Help you earn a rapid return on investment (ROI) by providing a range of new capabilities that you can use immediately. Through system configuration, you can help improve service to the business and reduce computing costs from the day

of adoption.

Increased integration of CICS applications

These enhancements include facilities to reuse CICS applications within broader on demand business scenarios, using standard interfaces — primarily Web services and Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) connectors — and other industry communication protocols.

Web services support

CICS Transaction Server, Version 3.1 extends its Web services support beyond the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) for CICS function that was available optionally with IBM CICS Transaction Server, Version 2. Together

with a range of extensions and new capabilities, this support now enables CICS business logic to be exposed as Web services, as part of a service- oriented architecture (SOA). These extensions include support for WS-Security to help protect SOAP messages. Support is also provided for distributed transaction-coordination capability compatible with the WS- Atomic Transaction specification

to help ensure that CICS Transaction Server can adhere to Web services standards.

CICS applications can naturally act in the role of both service provider and service requester, in cases where the services are defined using Web Services Description Language (WSDL). The ability of CICS Transaction Server to act as a service provider means that it is relatively simple for you to transform an existing CICS application into a Web service. The ability of CICS Transaction Server to act as a service requester means that a CICS application can issue

a single CICS command to use a Web service provided by any external provider.

To ease your ability to transform a CICS application into a Web service, IBM has included the CICS Web Services Assistant, a build-time capability provided to create WSDL

document from a simple language structure, or a language structure from an existing WSDL document. This support is provided for COBOL, C/C++ and PL/I. The assistant also generates information used to enable automatic run-time conversion between SOAP messages and containers and COMMAREAs. These capabilities help ensure that you do not have to write your own code to parse inbound messages and to construct outbound messages.

Enhanced HTTP support

CICS Web support is enhanced by upgrading CICS Transaction Server HTTP support to comply with the HTTP, Version 1.1 specification. Outbound HTTP support has also been added, so that CICS can act as both an HTTP server or as an HTTP client using simple EXEC CICS commands.

CICS Transaction Server also supports pipelining and chunking of messages. You can use new resource definitions, known as uriMAP definitions, to manage the HTTP server facility with- out needing to customize your analyzer program. CICS Transaction Server automatically creates virtual hosts using these definitions, so multiple host

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