John Horswill - Designing and Programming CICS Applications

This book is for new and experienced CICS application developers; whether youre an undergraduate, a new employee, or an experienced CICS developer who wishes to update your skills, this book is aimed at you. , onwards, we assume youre an application programmer needing to develop CICS applications. These chapters teach specific CICS skills such as developing programs in COBOL (the business logic), CICS Java, and Visual Basic, or integrating MQSeries with CICS. They contain guidance about designing, coding, and running the components of a typical CICS sample application.

We point you to various books in the CICS library that fill in any gaps because, in a book this size, we wont be able to tell you all about CICS. We discuss, and base our examples on, a subset of the full CICS facilities. This makes things easier for you because it means we wont have to keep referring you to other books in the CICS library while youre learning. These other books are listed in the bibliography, and are shown in the library diagram for your particular release of CICS. The subset of CICS commands weve chosen gives you a sound framework for your first application program and offers a logical starting point for more advanced work.

The main purpose of this book is to provide a friendly, straightforward, and modern approach to the writing of CICS application programs. It follows the development of a sample application, and at the end of each part you should be able to generate the relevant code and run the application.

The book describes a COBOL application that creates, reads, updates, and deletes records from a database with and without a locking mechanism. In addition, the COBOL program includes modules that browse, capture errors, and use the CICS Basic Mapping System (BMS) for data input and output to a traditional green screen. There are five additional parts that describe how you can use CICS to access your core COBOL application:

Each part describes the design of the component and how to write the code to implement the design.

Having written your application, you are guided through a step-by-step process to deploy your application into a CICS system. There is also advice on how to deal with the issues arising from large-scale deployment. Finally, there is a chapter describing some of the debugging facilities available in CICS.