Designing and Programming CICS Applications

Preface

This book explains how to write applications for CICS—the world’s favorite transaction processing system. Customer Information Control System (CICS) systems have been running for more than 30 years and CICS has changed dramatically during that time, from being a basic transaction processing monitor to being an advanced distributed application server.

Throughout its evolution, CICS has preserved and enhanced its support for developing and running a very large application workload. This book teaches you the traditional CICS skills and techniques that have delivered results for over 30 years that are still just as relevant today for building high-speed transaction processing applications. It also teaches the modern CICS skills and techniques that exploit today’s advanced technologies—Java™, Web, MQSeries, workstation tools—technologies that modern businesses need to exploit in order to stay competitive.

The Book’s Audience

This book is for new and experienced CICS application developers; whether you’re an undergraduate, a new employee, or an experienced CICS developer who wishes to update your skills, this book is aimed at you. Chapter 1, should be particularly useful to business managers who need to know how they can use CICS to add to, and improve, their existing business systems. Chapter 2, should be read by system architects, designers and programmers. It explains how to design the architecture for a modern transactional application, with a particular emphasis on the use of ...