Designing and Programming CICS Applications

Chapter 2. Designing Business Applications

In this chapter:

• The Heart of a Business Application

• How CICS Can Help the Application Designer

• Developing the Components of a Business Application

• What’s Next…

Chapter 1, looked at the essentials of a business application, and the advantages of using CICS to create and run business applications. It also described how many new types of applications, such as interactive web sites, involve an application server such as CICS. As well as having a long pedigree in supporting traditional business applications, CICS also has all of the characteristics needed to support the new types of applications. In this book we are going to develop a fictitious company called KanDoIT. They have been in business for a number of years and now want to expand their business and benefit from e-business opportunities either through the Web or by using message queuing technology or using clients to link to their CICS servers. Initially they have to set about gathering requirements from users and begin to develop an application that satisfies those needs. Much of the remainder of this book describes the design and the programming of the components of the KanDoIT company’s application.

Before looking at the details of the application, this chapter gives you some more ideas about the facilities that you can exploit in CICS to make writing scalable transactions with integrity easier. It covers the following topics:

• The key design elements that you need to consider when developing ...