CICS® Transaction Server for z/OS® provides comprehensive support for web services.
- A CICS application can participate in a heterogeneous web services environment as a service requester, as a service provider, or both.
- CICS supports the HTTP and WebSphere MQ transport protocols.
- CICS Transaction Server for z/OS includes
the CICS web services assistant, a set of utility
programs that help you map WSDL service descriptions into high-level
programming language data structures and vice versa. The utility programs
support the following programming languages:
- COBOL
- PL/I
- C
- C++
- CICS support for web services conforms to open
standards, including the following standards:
- SOAP 1.1 and 1.2
- HTTP 1.1
- WSDL 1.1 and 2.0
- CICS support for web services ensures maximum interoperability with other web services implementations by conditionally or fully complying with many web services specifications, including the WS-I Basic Profile Version 1.1. The profile is a set of nonproprietary web services specifications, with clarifications and amendments to those specifications, which, taken together, promote interoperability between different implementations of web services.
- CICS support for web services includes support for web services pipelines that are Java-based and non-Java-based. Java-based pipelines are processed using the T8 TCBs, and non-Java-based pipelines are processed using the L8 TCBs. This reduces the amount of QR TCB processing required to process the web service.
- CICS uses the IBM®
z/OS XML System Services (XMLSS) parser to parse SOAP
envelopes. The XMLSS parser uses 64-bit (above-the-bar) storage in the CICS region, leaving more storage below the bar for user programs. The XMLSS
parser also allows XML parsing to be offloaded to an IBM
zEnterprise® Application Assist Processor(zAAP). The zAAP-eligible proportion of the infrastructure for a web service is small, but if zAAP
capacity is available then this can reduce the cost of hosting web services in CICS. For more information, see the IBM
Redbooks® publication
zSeries Application
Assist Processor (zAAP) Implementation. - Web Services Atomic Transactions (WS-AT) use Web Services Addressing (WS-Addressing) elements in their SOAP headers. The default namespace prefix for these WS-Addressing elements has changed from wsa to cicswsa.
