Distributed CICS [antikvár]

This book is about transaction processing on computing systems smaller than mainframes. In particular, it is about the Customer Information Control System (CICS). CICS, an IBM product, has been the dominant transaction processing system for well over twenty years. Computing technology is undergoing many rapid changes. Some of these changes are termed downsizing or right- sizing or reengineering or restructuring. Other terms are client- server and distributed processing. One element of these changes is an interest in moving selected transaction processing applications from mainframe systems to smaller systems. CICS offers an attractive path for accomplishing this. CICS applications are much more closely tied to CICS than to the underlying operating system. In the best cases, a CICS application on a mainframe CICS system can be recompiled on a smaller system, installed in a smaller version of CICS, and used without further changes. A direct migration of an application from mainframe CICS to CICS on a smaller platform simply produces exactly that: another version of the CICS application. It is still a centralized application, and this may well be exactly what is required. However, new features in CICS (especially in the smaller CICS implementa- tions) offer many client-server and distributed processing inter- faces. A suitable CICS application offers an excellent path into today's distributed client-server arena, without needing to di- rectly program the underlying mechanisms of distributed pro- cessing. In fairness, one should recognize that the original CICS (released as a product in 1968) was one of the earliest distributed