Modernizing Applications with IBM CICS

Book excerpt: IBM® CICS® is a mixed language application server that runs on IBM Z®. Over the 50 years since CICS was introduced in 1969, enterprises have used the qualities of service (QoSs) that CICS provides to allow them to create high throughput and secure transactional applications that have powered their business. As the IT landscape has evolved, so has CICS to allow these applications to integrate with new platforms and still provide value to the rest of the business. Because of this capability, many businesses still rely on CICS to power their core applications. This IBM Redpaper publication focuses on modernizing these CICS applications, allowing them to integrate with cloud-native applications. This modernization can be achieved either by constructing application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow new cloud-native applications to connect to your existing assets, rewriting parts of your application in newer languages and hosting them back on CICS, or by using CICS capabilities to extend your applications to provide new capabilities and functions. The paper takes a traditional example application and shows you how it works. Then, the paper extends the example, rewrites portions of its functions, and enables its APIs. It also explains how CICS applications can use continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) to deliver, test, and deploy code into CICS easily and with quality.