Designing and Programming CICS Applications

Part I. Introduction to CICS

You may not be aware of it, but hardly a day goes by when something that you do has not involved a CICS application somewhere in the world—whether it is a trip to the supermarket, taking money from your bank account, having a package delivered to your house, managing your company’s accounts, stock control or personnel records—CICS is involved. CICS is also involved in many manufacturing plants, providing feedback about the production processes and stock levels, and it may even be linked to suppliers so that stocks can be replenished when necessary. In short, CICS is likely to have played a part in much of the underlying software (often called middleware) that underpins all types of industry applications.

Part I looks at how CICS can help in the world of business applications. It contains the following chapters:

• Chapter 1, describes the essentials of a business application, and the benefits of using CICS with business applications.

• Chapter 2, looks at the key design elements in a business application, and the CICS facilities that support the application designer.

• Chapter 3, describes the planning of a CICS application that uses existing COBOL business logic and a variety of presentation logic including Dynamic HyperText Markup Language (DHTML), CICS Java (JCICS), a Visual Basic front end using a CICS client, a Java frontend integrating MQSeries with CICS, as well as a traditional 3270 frontend.