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49-406: IBM CICS (Customer Information Control System) is a family of mixed-language application servers that provide online transaction management and connectivity for applications on IBM mainframe systems under z/OS and z/VSE . CICS family products are designed as middleware and support rapid, high-volume online transaction processing . A CICS transaction is a unit of processing initiated by

98-523: A Queen's Award for Technological Achievement. In 1986, IBM announced CICS support for the record-oriented file services defined by Distributed Data Management Architecture (DDM). This enabled programs on remote, network-connected computers to create, manage, and access files that had previously been available only within the CICS/MVS and CICS/VSE transaction processing environments. In newer versions of CICS, support for DDM has been removed. Support for

147-722: A Web Bridge technology for wrapping green-screen terminal-based programs with an HTML facade. CICS Web and Document APIs were enhanced in CICS TS V1.3 to enable web-aware applications to be written to interact more effectively with web browsers. CICS TS versions 2.1 through 2.3 focused on introducing CORBA and EJB technologies to CICS, offering new ways to integrate CICS assets into distributed application component models. These technologies relied on hosting Java applications in CICS. The Java hosting environment saw numerous improvements over many releases. A multi-threaded JVM resource called

196-406: A competitive "game" developed among system optimization analysts. When critical path code was identified, a code snippet was passed around from one analyst to another. Each person had to either (a) reduce the number of bytes of code required, or (b) reduce the number of CPU cycles required. Younger analysts learned from what more-experienced mentors did. Eventually, when no one could do (a) or (b),

245-417: A few years, CICS generated over $ 60 billion in new hardware revenue for IBM, and became their most-successful mainframe software product. In 1972, CICS was available in three versions – DOS-ENTRY (program number 5736-XX6) for DOS/360 machines with very limited memory, DOS-STANDARD (program number 5736-XX7), for DOS/360 machines with more memory, and OS-STANDARD V2 (program number 5734-XX7) for

294-474: A keyboard was available for display-only applications. The eighty character width corresponded to IBM punch card format. The IBM 2260 and successor devices were transitional punch-card-to-CRT computer hardware that inspired many office of the future authors to write about the potential of the paperless office . The 2260 was a raster display with the unusual property that the scan lines were vertical – they went from top to bottom rather than

343-526: A native implementation of the Atom publishing protocol. Many of the newer web facing technologies were made available for earlier releases of CICS using delivery models other than a traditional product release. This allowed early adopters to provide constructive feedback that could influence the final design of the integrated technology. Examples include the Soap for CICS technology preview SupportPac for TS V2.2, or

392-404: A phonograph needle pickup). The central controller system vibrated the electromagnet like an audio-speaker voice coil . A fraction of a second later, the other end of the mechanical wire would vibrate. The vibration was converted to raster scan lines and sent to the nearby CRT display. The IBM 2848 delay line was a continuous electromechanical feedback loop. One effect of the 2848 delay line

441-561: A single request that may affect one or more objects. This processing is usually interactive (screen-oriented), but background transactions are possible. CICS Transaction Server (CICS TS) sits at the head of the CICS family and provides services that extend or replace the functions of the operating system. These services can be more efficient than the generalized operating system services and also simpler for programmers to use, particularly with respect to communication with diverse terminal devices. Applications developed for CICS may be written in

490-649: A variety of programming languages and use CICS-supplied language extensions to interact with resources such as files, database connections , terminals, or to invoke functions such as web services. CICS manages the entire transaction such that if for any reason a part of the transaction fails all recoverable changes can be backed out. While CICS TS has its highest profile among large financial institutions, such as banks and insurance companies, many Fortune 500 companies and government entities are reported to run CICS. Other, smaller enterprises can also run CICS TS and other CICS family products. CICS can regularly be found behind

539-534: Is also available on other operating systems, notably IBM i and OS/2 . The z/OS implementation (i.e., CICS Transaction Server for z/OS) is by far the most popular and significant. Two versions of CICS were previously available for VM/CMS , but both have since been discontinued. In 1986, IBM released CICS/CMS , which was a single-user version of CICS designed for development use, the applications later being transferred to an MVS or DOS/VS system for production execution. Later, in 1988, IBM released CICS/VM . CICS/VM

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588-471: Is for developers to focus on the business logic . Jakarta EE (formerly Java EE or J2EE) defines the core set of API and features of Java application servers . The Jakarta EE infrastructure is partitioned into logical containers. Microsoft's .NET positions their middle-tier applications and services infrastructure in the Windows Server operating system and the .NET Framework technologies in

637-521: Is possible to provide a measure of advance application protection by performing test under control of a monitoring program that also serves to provide Test and Debug features. When CICS was first released, it only supported application transaction programs written in IBM 360 Assembler . COBOL and PL/I support were added years later. Because of the initial assembler orientation, requests for CICS services were made using assembler-language macros . For example,

686-517: The CICS Family refers to a portfolio of transaction servers, connectors (called CICS Transaction Gateway ) and CICS Tools. CICS on distributed platforms—not mainframes—is called IBM TXSeries . TXSeries is distributed transaction processing middleware. It supports C, C++, COBOL, Java™ and PL/I applications in cloud environments and traditional data centers. TXSeries is available on AIX , Linux x86, Windows , Solaris , and HP-UX platforms. CICS

735-805: The IBM Personal Computer as a CICS intelligent terminal (instead of the incompatible Intel chip, and immature ASCII -based Microsoft 1980 DOS ). Because of the limited capacity of even large processors of that era every CICS installation was required to assemble the source code for all of the CICS system modules after completing a process similar to system generation (sysgen), called CICSGEN , to establish values for conditional assembly-language statements. This process allowed each customer to exclude support from CICS itself for any feature they did not intend to use, such as device support for terminal types not in use. CICS owes its early popularity to its relatively efficient implementation when hardware

784-483: The open-source software initiative. Corporations like Standard Oil of Indiana (Amoco) made major contributions to CICS. The IBM Des Plaines team tried to add support for popular non-IBM terminals like the ASCII Teletype Model 33 ASR, but the small low-budget software development team could not afford the $ 100-per-month hardware to test it. IBM executives incorrectly felt that the future would be like

833-409: The 1965 IBM 2741 Selectric (golf ball) typewriter-based terminal. The 1964 IBM 2260 and 1972 IBM 3270 video display terminals were widely used later. In the early days of IBM mainframes, computer software was free – bundled at no extra charge with computer hardware . The OS/360 operating system and application support software like CICS were "open" to IBM customers long before

882-657: The ATOM SupportPac for TS V3.1. This approach was used to introduce JSON support for CICS TS V4.2, a technology that went on to be integrated into CICS TS V5.2. The JSON technology in CICS is similar to earlier SOAP technology, both of which allowed programs hosted in CICS to be wrapped with a modern facade. The JSON technology was in turn enhanced in z/OS Connect Enterprise Edition, an IBM product for composing JSON APIs that can leverage assets from several mainframe subsystems. Many partner products have also been used to interact with CICS. Popular examples include using

931-664: The CICS Transaction Gateway for connecting to CICS from JCA compliant Java application servers, and IBM DataPower appliances for filtering web traffic before it reaches CICS. Modern versions of CICS provide many ways for both existing and new software assets to be integrated into distributed application flows. CICS assets can be accessed from remote systems, and can access remote systems; user identity and transactional context can be propagated; RESTful APIs can be composed and managed; devices, users and servers can interact with CICS using standards-based technologies; and

980-754: The CICS development responsibility was picked up by the IBM Hursley site in the United Kingdom, which had just ceased work on the PL/I compiler and so knew many of the same customers as CICS. The core of the development work continues in Hursley today alongside contributions from labs in India, China, Russia, Australia, and the United States. CICS originally only supported a few IBM-brand devices like

1029-467: The DDM component of CICS z/OS was discontinued at the end of 2003, and was removed from CICS for z/OS in version 5.2 onward. In CICS TS for z/VSE, support for DDM was stabilised at V1.1.1 level, with an announced intention to discontinue it in a future release. In CICS for z/VSE 2.1 onward, CICS/DDM is not supported. CICS Transaction Server first introduced a native HTTP interface in version 1.2, together with

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1078-553: The IBM WebSphere Liberty environment in CICS promotes the rapid adoption of new technologies. By January, 1985 a 1969-founded consulting company, having done "massive on-line systems" for Hilton Hotels, FTD Florists, Amtrak, and Budget Rent-a-Car, announced what became MicroCICS . The initial focus was the IBM XT/370 and IBM AT/370 . Although when CICS is mentioned, people usually mean CICS Transaction Server,

1127-597: The JVMSERVER was introduced during the CICS TS version 4.1 release, this was further enhanced to use 64-bit JVM technology in version 5.1. Version 5.1 also saw the introduction of the WebSphere Liberty profile web-container. Ultimately WebSphere Liberty was fully embedded into CICS Transaction Server in version 5.3. Numerous web facing technologies could be hosted in CICS using Java, this ultimately resulted in

1176-651: The Public Utility prefix was dropped with the introduction of the first release of the CICS Program Product on July 8, 1969, not long after IMS database management system . For the next few years, CICS was developed in Palo Alto and was considered a less important "smaller" product than IMS which IBM then considered more strategic. Customer pressure kept it alive, however. When IBM decided to end development of CICS in 1974 to concentrate on IMS,

1225-484: The code was considered optimized, and they moved on to other snippets. Small shops with only one analyst learned CICS optimization very slowly (or not at all). Because application programs could be shared by many concurrent threads, the use of static variables embedded within a program (or use of operating system memory) was restricted (by convention only). Unfortunately, many of the "rules" were frequently broken, especially by COBOL programmers who might not understand

1274-690: The fact that top-quality CICS skills were in high demand and short supply. They were addressed in TS V3.3, V4.1 and V5.2 with the Storage Protection, Transaction Isolation and Subspace features respectively, which utilize operating system hardware features to protect the application code and the data within the same address space even though the applications were not written to be separated. CICS application transactions remain mission-critical for many public utility companies, large banks and other multibillion-dollar financial institutions. Additionally, it

1323-681: The following technological challenges: An application server can be deployed: { Table Web Interfaces } IBM 2260 The text-only monochrome IBM 2260 cathode-ray tube (CRT) video display terminal (Display Station) plus keyboard was a 1964 predecessor to the more-powerful IBM 3270 terminal line which eventually was extended to support color text and graphics. There were three models of 2260. Model 1 displayed 240 characters, formatted as six rows of forty characters. Model 2 displayed 480 characters, formatted as twelve rows of forty characters. Model 3 displayed 960 characters, formatted as twelve rows of eighty characters. A model without

1372-735: The four core foundational CICS tools (and the CICS Optimization Solution Pack for z/OS) were updated with the release of CICS Transaction Server for z/OS 5.3. The four core CICS Tools: CICS Interdependency Analyzer for z/OS, CICS Deployment Assistant for z/OS, CICS Performance Analyzer for z/OS and CICS Configuration Manager for z/OS. CICS Transaction Server for z/OS has used the following release numbers: Multiple-user interactive-transaction application programs were required to be quasi - reentrant in order to support multiple concurrent transaction threads . A software coding error in one application could block all users from

1421-449: The internals of their programs or fail to use the necessary restrictive compile time options. This resulted in "non-re-entrant" code that was often unreliable, leading to spurious storage violations and entire CICS system crashes. Originally, the entire partition , or Multiple Virtual Storage (MVS) region, operated with the same memory protection key including the CICS kernel code. Program corruption and CICS control block corruption

1470-416: The introduction of integrated circuit chips, the technology was based on discrete-component individual transistors . Mainframe computers used magnetic core memory, which was too expensive for use in video display terminals . The delay line was an unusual mechanical (not electrical) spiral wire with an electromagnet on one end and a torsion rotation detector on the other (which was conceptually similar to

1519-589: The larger machines which ran OS/360. In early 1970, a number of the original developers, including Ben Riggins (the principal architect of the early releases) relocated to California and continued CICS development at IBM's Palo Alto Development Center. IBM executives did not recognize value in software as a revenue-generating product until after federal law required software unbundling . In 1980, IBM executives failed to heed Ben Riggins' strong suggestions that IBM should provide their own EBCDIC -based operating system and integrated-circuit microprocessor chip for use in

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1568-458: The more common left to right. Up to twenty-four 2260 terminals were clustered around an IBM 2848 Display Control. The controller could function as a local channel-attached device or as a remote device at up to 2400 bit/s. An optional adapter allowed the attachment of one IBM 1053 printer which was shared by all displays attached to the 2848. The 2848 stored the digital image of screens of information in an acoustic delay line . Before

1617-591: The past, with batch processing using traditional punch cards . IBM reluctantly provided only minimal funding when public utility companies, banks and credit-card companies demanded a cost-effective interactive system (similar to the 1965 IBM Airline Control Program used by the American Airlines Sabre computer reservation system ) for high-speed data access-and-update to customer information for their telephone operators (without waiting for overnight batch processing punch card systems). When CICS

1666-540: The program. The BLLs can then be dynamically set, either by CICS or by the application to allow access to the corresponding structure in the Linkage Section. Application servers An application server framework is a service layer model. It includes software components available to a software developer through an application programming interface . An application server may have features such as clustering , fail-over , and load-balancing . The goal

1715-732: The removal of the native CORBA and EJB technologies. CICS TS V3.1 added a native implementation of the SOAP and WSDL technologies for CICS, together with client side HTTP APIs for outbound communication. These twin technologies enabled easier integration of CICS components with other Enterprise applications, and saw widespread adoption. Tools were included for taking traditional CICS programs written in languages such as COBOL , and converting them into WSDL defined Web Services, with little or no program changes. This technology saw regular enhancements over successive releases of CICS. CICS TS V4.1 and V4.2 saw further enhancements to web connectivity, including

1764-417: The request to read a record from a file were made by a macro call to the "File Control Program" of CICS might look like this: This gave rise to the later terminology " Macro-level CICS." When high-level language support was added, the macros were retained and the code was converted by a pre-compiler that expanded the macros to their COBOL or PL/I CALL statement equivalents. Thus preparing a HLL application

1813-954: The role of an application server. The Windows Application Server role includes Internet Information Services (IIS) to provide web server support, the .NET Framework to provide application support, ASP.NET to provide server side scripting , COM+ for application component communication, Message Queuing for multithreaded processing, and the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) for application communication. PHP application servers run and manage PHP applications. Mobile application servers provide data delivery to mobile devices. Core capabilities of mobile application services include Although most standards-based infrastructure (including SOAs ) are designed to connect to any independent of any vendor, product or technology, most enterprises have trouble connecting back-end systems to mobile applications, because mobile devices add

1862-485: The scenes in, for example, bank-teller applications, ATM systems, industrial production control systems, insurance applications, and many other types of interactive applications. Recent CICS TS enhancements include new capabilities to improve the developer experience, including the choice of APIs, frameworks, editors, and build tools, while at the same time providing updates in the key areas of security, resilience, and management. In earlier, recent CICS TS releases, support

1911-424: The system. The modular design of CICS reentrant / reusable control programs meant that, with judicious "pruning," multiple users with multiple applications could be executed on a computer with just 32K of expensive magnetic core physical memory (including the operating system ). Considerable effort was required by CICS application programmers to make their transactions as efficient as possible. A common technique

1960-453: Was a frequent cause of system downtime. A software error in one application program could overwrite the memory (code or data) of one or all currently running application transactions. Locating the offending application code for complex transient timing errors could be a very-difficult operating-system analyst problem. These shortcomings persisted for multiple new releases of CICS over a period of more than 20 years, in spite of their severity and

2009-638: Was an IBM systems engineer at Virginia Electric Power Co. when he came up with the idea for the online system. CICS was originally developed in the United States out of the IBM Development Center in Des Plaines, Illinois , beginning in 1966 to address requirements from the public utility industry. The first CICS product was announced in 1968, named Public Utility Customer Information Control System , or PU-CICS. It became clear immediately that it had applicability to many other industries, so

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2058-576: Was delivered to Amoco with Teletype Model 33 ASR support, it caused the entire OS/360 operating system to crash (including non-CICS application programs). The majority of the CICS Terminal Control Program (TCP – the heart of CICS) and part of OS/360 had to be laboriously redesigned and rewritten by Amoco Production Company in Tulsa Oklahoma. It was then given back to IBM for free distribution to others. In

2107-462: Was effectively a "two-stage" compile  – output from the preprocessor fed into the HLL compiler as input. COBOL considerations : unlike PL/I, IBM COBOL does not normally provide for the manipulation of pointers (addresses). In order to allow COBOL programmers to access CICS control blocks and dynamic storage the designers resorted to what was essentially a hack. The COBOL Linkage Section

2156-436: Was intended for use on the IBM 9370 , a low-end mainframe targeted at departmental use; IBM positioned CICS/VM running on departmental or branch office mainframes for use in conjunction with a central mainframe running CICS for MVS. Provisioning, management and analysis of CICS systems and applications is provided by CICS Tools. This includes performance management as well as deployment and management of CICS resources. In 2015,

2205-411: Was normally used for inter-program communication, such as parameter passing. The compiler generates a list of addresses, each called a Base Locator for Linkage (BLL) which were set on entry to the called program. The first BLL corresponds to the first item in the Linkage Section and so on. CICS allows the programmer to access and manipulate these by passing the address of the list as the first argument to

2254-465: Was provided for Web services and Java , event processing , Atom feeds, and RESTful interfaces. CICS was preceded by an earlier, single-threaded transaction processing system, IBM MTCS . An 'MTCS-CICS bridge' was later developed to allow these transactions to execute under CICS with no change to the original application programs. IBM's Customer Information Control System (CICS), first developed in conjunction with Michigan Bell in 1966. Ben Riggins

2303-424: Was that if a heavy person walked next to the controller, or if it was mounted next to a vibration source (like an elevator), digital bits of screen images would be lost on all of the video displays, which would then be repeated continuously through the feedback loop until a new video display was transmitted to all of the connected terminals. The IBM 2265 attached to an IBM 2845 is a less expensive equivalent to

2352-697: Was to limit the size of individual programs to no more than 4,096 bytes, or 4K, so that CICS could easily reuse the memory occupied by any program not currently in use for another program or other application storage needs. When virtual memory was added to versions OS/360 in 1972, the 4K strategy became even more important to reduce paging and thrashing unproductive resource-contention overhead. The efficiency of compiled high-level COBOL and PL/I language programs left much to be desired. Many CICS application programs continued to be written in assembler language, even after COBOL and PL/I support became available. With 1960s-and-1970s hardware resources expensive and scarce,

2401-539: Was very expensive, its multi-threaded processing architecture, its relative simplicity for developing terminal-based real-time transaction applications, and many open-source customer contributions, including both debugging and feature enhancement. Part of CICS was formalized using the Z notation in the 1980s and 1990s in collaboration with the Oxford University Computing Laboratory , under the leadership of Tony Hoare . This work won

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