"Kenneth D. Litwak" wrote:
>
> >CICS *is* an application server... and a transaction monitor. And CICS
> >does *not* contain "a proprietary setof APIs to read and write data sets
> >on a record basis." CICS customers generally use VSAM, DB2, or Adabas
> >for file access.
> >
> >Whatever made you think CICS wasn't an application server?
>
> It depends upon how you define application server. If we are going to bend that
> definition to whatever we like, Powerbuilder is an application server.
Ok, so I didn't define the term "application server". It is pretty
nebulous,
but I intuitively feel that an application server should support a
majority
of the following features:
* mechanism to define/update/monitor application programs
* ability to execute transactional programs on the server on behalf of a
client
* management of threads/strings/processes, with an eye towards
scalabiltiy
* transaction resource management, commit, rollback, 2PC
* management of I/O from application server clients
* management of external resource connections (eg, database, messaging,
etc.)
* security
I think that CICS has all of these features. It may not be as easy
as with some other application servers (eg, integrating DB2 connectivity
into a CICS region), but all of these features are certainly covered.
I would also suggest that support for "plug-in" style integration of
any of the above features would not disqualify a product from being
an application server. Let's take security. In CICS, you can plug-in
RACF or ACF2. But who cares that CICS doesn't implement security
directly; CICS does provide the appropriate exit/hook for an external
security system to plug into. By your logic, Solaris 7 probably
wouldn't
qualify as an operating system because it doesn't have security (since
the security subsystem is plug-in, and developers can write their own
security implementation to plug into Solaris).
> Have you ever written CICS application code?
I have done a little development in CICS (MVS), Distributed CICS (Unix),
and communications development using CPI-C. I wouldn't---by any stretch
of the imagination---claim to be an expert. But I have come to a pretty
good understanding of what CICS is and what it can do.
-eric
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