IBM Announces New Release of CICS Transaction Server for OS/390
Now Exploits Java to Transform a Company’s CICS-Based Business into an E-Business
Paris (September 21, 1998) – IBM today announced a new release of its industry-dominant enterprise application server that will make it easier for customers and software vendors to develop applications for e-business via the Internet and Java.
IBM CICS Transaction Server for OS/390, v1.3, will help customers, application developers, and systems and application vendors increase productivity, reduce development costs and time to market, and extend market reach in four critical areas of enterprise computing: application enablement, e-business enablement, enterprise scalability and enterprise management.
By focusing on these four key areas, CICS TS v1.3 provides improved productivity, easier operational and systems management capabilities, increased price performance, manageability, and scalability.
“With more than 25 years experience running the world’s business, CICS has already proven itself to be the industry’s most successful application server,” said Rob Lamb, CICS business manager, IBM Software. “Now it’s even better with the ability to execute server Java applications and JavaBeans from its proven, scaleable subsystem. This lets customers marry the capabilities of their existing CICS systems with the latest developments in Java to create new applications that extend their business. The new release positions CICS TS as a premier enterprise server for e-business.”
CICS TS v1.3 allows customers to leverage existing applications and skills, while providing a robust environment to create new e-business applications. Users have the unique ability to execute server Java code alongside existing CICS applications written in languages such as COBOL and PL/I. In addition, CICS TS v1.3 contains features that exploit IBM S/390 Parallel Sysplex clustering technology to reduce the cost of computing and supports the re-use of existing CICS applications for deployment on the World Wide Web.
Application Enablement
CICS TS v1.3 introduces two new application models to increase developer productivity, code reuse and manageability of systems. It makes applications represent more closely the enterprise’s overall business processes and workflow.
CICS support for the Java language. With extensive support for Java, CICS keeps developers at the leading edge of technology while making it easy for companies to exploit business opportunities on the Internet. In addition, CICS TS v1.3 reduces costs by increasing productivity with visual AD tools and JavaBeans. It also shortens time to market and lowers production costs through new object-oriented interfaces for C++ and Java, to reuse existing data and processes.
CICS Business Transaction Services (CICS BTS). CICS BTS extends the existing CICS application programming interface (API) to new client types and provides a new set of tools and services for controlling the execution of long-running business transactions. It allows companies to build event-driven applications while ensuring the application’s reliability, integrity, performance, scalability and availability are not compromised. It enables developers to build CICS business transactions that more closely reflect a business process, and greatly simplifies the task of building complex or e-business solutions.
E-Business Enablement
CICS TS v1.3’s enhanced e-business support allows companies to reach more customers by making existing applications and business processes available on the Web. These include comprehensive support for Java applications through the support of the Inter-ORB protocol (IIOP) and CORBA client support, allowing companies to build a distributed object-oriented model that closely reflects their business processes, while gaining the benefits of improved scalability and management. The CICS Web interface support has been enhanced to improve the definition, manipulation and management of HTML templates, and the attachment of Web browsers to existing CICS applications either directly or through outboard gateways. Moreover, the CICS Transaction Gateway provides related facilities for attaching Web browsers via outboard gateways so that CICS can work with Web servers on AIX, Solaris, Windows NT, and OS/2.
Enterprise Scalability
CICS TS v1.3 continues to exploit the IBM S/390 Parallel Sysplex clustering technology, providing companies with greater availability, scalability and flexibility to add a new CICS application without disrupting operations. CICS now dynamically routes transactions started by distributed program link (DPL) commands and CICS Start commands, improving the performance, reliability and workload balancing across a Parallel Sysplex cluster. New data tables resident in the Parallel Sysplex coupling facility provide a fast and reliable way for programs to share working data across an S/390 cluster with full integrity. New support is provided to better access and serialize named resources across a specified set of CICS regions contained in a Parallel Sysplex environment thus improving performance and capacity.
Enterprise Management
CICSPlex System Manager (CICSPlex SM) contained within CICS TS has been updated to support the new functions and features provided in CICS TS v1.3. CICSPlex SM is a powerful CICS management product and provides single systems image, single point of control, single point of definition for CICS resources and workload balancing for CICS applications across a Parallel Sysplex cluster. Other CICS TS v1.3 enhancements to reduce the operational costs of managing a CICS enterprise include online support for the CICS temporary storage table, better CICS monitoring and statistics and autoinstall for MVS consoles, saving systems programmers time and effort in maintaining, defining and installing individual consoles.
Pricing and Availability
CICS Transaction Server for OS/390, v1.3 will be available worldwide in March of 1999 through independent software vendors (ISVs), systems integrators, select business partners and directly from IBM. Customers should contact their local sales representative for pricing. IBM will deliver support for Enterprise Java Beans in CICS in 1999.
Source: IBM