I didn't see anyone else mention it yet, so here's IBM's announcement of the open beta program for CICS Transaction Server 5.2:
http://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/rep_ca/5/897/ENUS214-015/ENUS214-015.PDF You can download the beta version of CICS TS 5.2 starting in late February, 2014, by visiting this Web site: http://www.ibm.com/cics/openbeta You'll need z/OS 1.13 or higher to run the CICS TS 5.2 beta version(s) -- and presumably the final release as well. (A single available z/OS 1.13 or higher LPAR or z/VM guest will do.) There's no charge for using the beta version. See the announcement letter for details on terms and conditions (which are simple and few). For those of you unfamiliar with CICS Transaction Server, it's one of the world's premier transaction processing and application hosting environments -- and that's an understatement, really. And it's probably the world's most popular mission-critical transaction manager. Here are some of the highlights in Version 5.2: - First class, updated support for the WebSphere Liberty Profile, meaning you can run all sorts of Java applications based on those popular Java-related standards in CICS TS. Nothing extra required -- it's ready to go and very convenient. Yes, if you have CICS TS you have Java and Java application hosting, standard, at no additional charge. And anybody/everybody developing Java-based applications -- including open source developers -- is already a CICS TS developer. It's genuine, 100% WebSphere Liberty and its rich function set, but with CICS TS service levels, fast startup, and reduced memory requirements. Great stuff here. Maybe Kirk (for example) can comment further on this aspect of CICS TS, but (if you can't tell) I think it's one of the best additions to CICS (and to z/OS) ever. - Integrated JSON and REST support, which will be of particular interest to those developing and deployment mobile applications. This support is available as a no charge add-on, but now it's part of the base CICS TS distribution and thus even more convenient. Likewise, more security features are integrated in the base distribution, e.g. SAML support. - More Unicode-related and COBOL-related support for service mappings (SOAP and JSON). - More exploitation of IP interconnectivity (IPIC) for more high availability deployment scenarios. - Applications which use COMMAREAs can now jump forward to use containers without application restructuring. So you can standardize on containers (no 32K limit!) and gradually expand those COMMAREAs into container-sized data structures as/when you see fit. This is really great for application evolution. - More threadsafe support, and less use of 31-bit storage. (CICS TS is increasingly exploiting 64-bit storage, and those improvements continue.) - More cloud-oriented capabilities, such as multiple application versioning with the lifecycle management of first-class applications and greater dynamic control over CICS regions/topologies. The basic idea here is you have lots of capabilities for instantly or near-instantly, dynamically, automatically provisioning and de-provisioning CICS applications (and multi-component application topologies which include CICS-hosted components) and associated runtime environments. - CICS Explorer picks up lots of enhancements consistent with improvements to CICS TS itself, plus CICS Explorer 5.2 will let you define and manage workloads with CICSPlex System Manager (CPSM) workload management (WLM). I should editorialize here that CPSM does not require Sysplex or Parallel Sysplex, and some people get confused by the "Plex" in the name. CPSM is very useful indeed in many situations, even when you run CICS on a single LPAR in a monoplex. So don't skip over that CPSM information if you have previously because you didn't think you qualified. If you have CICS TS, you have CPSM, and you should strongly consider enabling CPSM if you haven't already. - There are even more features to trigger additional CICS autonomic actions based on service thresholds. This is very helpful if you have "problem child" transaction programs that currently require operation attention. Let CICS handle more of that work (and prevent those problem children from affecting more than their individual scopes). That lets you then focus on actually fixing those problem children in a much less urgent, more precise way. That's a consistent theme in z/OS computing overall, actually. Enjoy, and let IBM know what you think through the beta feedback channels. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Timothy Sipples GMU VCT Architect Executive (Based in Singapore) E-Mail: sipp...@sg.ibm.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
