Designing and Programming CICS Applications

Chapter 3. Introducing the Sample Application

In this chapter:

• The Business Case

• The Design of the Sample Application

• What’s Next…

Chapters Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 described the essentials of a business application, and the advantages of using CICS in business applications. The remainder of this book is concerned with the design and the programming needed to build a CICS application along the lines of those described in the previous chapters. Before getting into the details, let’s look at the business case and the reason why our fictitious company, KanDoIT, might want to develop a CICS application.

The Business Case

The KanDoIT company is a successful business with an IT department that includes a CICS development team and a web design group. It has thousands of customers. The customer accounts file holds the customer’s name, address, telephone number, charge limit, current balance, account activity, payment history, and so on. It uses a short, unique account number that is allocated manually (this wouldn’t happen in the real world but it’s included here for simplicity) when a new account is opened.

The existing application creates, reads, updates, and deletes customer accounts, and it needs to be expanded to meet the expected future demand. It runs on an IBM S/390 mainframe computer that is also used for other, unrelated applications. The application was developed many years ago, and is used by staff in the accounts department and in the customer services department. The staff run, the ...