Business continuity planning

It seems strange talking about business continuity planning for mainframe sites because most of them created their plan back in the days when BCP was called DR (Disaster Recovery). And although, for mainframe sites, things don’t seem to have changed to any great extent in perhaps as much as 30 years, the truth is, they have. And it’s a good idea to re-evaluate the Business Continuity Plan now.

In fact, it’s probably a good idea to start from the beginning, in terms of planning, and see what systems you have in place that needs to be available for the organization to continue in business, and how long you can be ‘down’ for. It was often a joke that non-mainframe sites had rooms full of servers running Linux and/or Windows servers and no-one knew what exactly ran on what hardware – and yet, something similar can be the case with mainframes. There is nowadays quite a disconnect between what an end user views as a single transaction and how the subsystems may see it. An end user may simply need to access some data – but, for that to happen, the transaction may start in CICS, access DB2 data, go back to CICS, involve IMS, go back to CICS, access some VSAM files, and finally end up in CICS again. So subsystem-level recovery can lead to confusion.

But let’s start at the beginning. What’s the first thing to do? Identify the business assets that need to be protected, then assess how business critical each process is and create a priority list. Next find the data and technology that’s needed for the business process to occur. Armed with that list, you can set objectives for their recovery, and design strategies and services that can be used to restore access to data for the applications and end users who need them. This is probably easier said than done because it also has to be achieved within time frames that mean your organization stays in business.

You need to be able to run the applications on probably new working processors, you need to get them talking to the latest version of the data, and you need to get your users connected to the applications. The options for how to do this range from cheap to hugely expensive. Like all insurance, you don’t want to have to make use of it, but when you do, you want it to cover everything. So what are your choices? You can do nothing – definitely the cheapest, until things go wrong and then it’s probably the end of the company staying in business. You can use a service bureau or another site. This again is bit like hoping nothing will go wrong, but if it does, you have some way of staying business until you can get your own hardware up and running. You need to ensure the other site is not in the same building or even city – earthquakes and other natural disasters do happen. You could have a cold standby site. This a dearer option, but once everything is powered up, you’re pretty much back in business. The dearest option is the hot standby site, where you basically copy everything to it as it happens on the main site. This hot site can continue running the business for you at a moment’s notice. If you’re a bank or similar, this is what you need. Your users just experience a small hiccough and they continue working. They connect to the new site without realizing anything has changed.

And that is your first big decision over with. The next step is to look at individual systems (such as IMS and CICS) and see how each of those can failover to the back-up site. Look into how you can ensure data is correct, and how in-flight tasks can have their data backed out and the whole task restarted. How quickly can communications be switched across to the back-up site? And what are the chances of both sites being hit by the same disaster?

And then you need to practice the BCP and see what you forgot in your plan. Which pieces of kit do you use that aren’t standard and can’t be replicated? There are so many things that can go wrong at each site because the set-up can be so different (while being superficially so similar). Who has access to the BCP? Who needs access to the BCP? What happens if a key person is doing a charity sleepover in some rundown part of town and hasn’t got a phone with them? What happens if your company is being attacked by terrorists of hacktivists or disgruntled ex-employees?

There’s lots to consider. But the first step is to re-visit your Business Continuity Plan – and do it soon.

REXX - the wonder program!

REXX (REXX or Rexx) has been around since the early 80s. I first came across it in the mid-80s, when sites were beginning to use it with VM and CMS as a powerful replacement for EXECs. I thought it would be interesting to take a look at this venerable, but still powerful tool in the system programmer’s toolkit.

Amazingly, REXX wasn’t written as an IBM project, it was written by IBMer Mike Cowlishaw in his own time in Assembler. It was designed as a macro or scripting language and was based on PL/I. It first saw the light of day at SHARE in 1981, and became a full IBM product in 1982.

IBM has implemented REXX on VM, MVS, VSE, CICS, AIX, and AS/400s, and on subsequent products. There are even versions available for Java, Windows, and Linux. A compiled version for CMS became available in 1987 and was written by Lundin and Woodruff.

REXX was so popular that versions were developed for other platforms, including Unix, Solaris, Apple Mac OS X, OpenVMS, and lots of others. There’s also NetRexx, which compiles to Java byte code, and ObjectREXX, which is an object-oriented version of REXX.

In 2005, Open Object Rexx (ooRexx) was announced. It has a Windows Script Host (WSH) scripting engine. So code can be written for Windows. It also has a command line Rexx interpreter.

Those of you who use the ZEN family of products from William Data Systems will be interested to know that ZEN Rexx, formerly available with ZEN’s AUTOMATION component, has now been made available to all WDS customers through the base ZEN component.

ZEN’s Rexx support comprises: a ZEN Rexx Interface; a ZEN Rexx Function Pack; and a command interface. The ZEN Rexx Interface provides support for running Rexx programs under ZEN in a similar way to running Rexx programs under TSO or Netview. You can also run ZEN Rexx programs using a Modify (F) command from the z/OS console. Under ZEN, Rexx programs can be run from the ZEN Profile at initialization time, from the Command Facility and System Log panels, or from a user-defined ZEN menu item.

The ZEN Rexx Function Pack provides extensions to standard REXX through which users can communicate directly with ZEN. The command interface enables users to issue commands from their ZEN Rexx programs and get any responses back. This means that commands provided by their WDS ZEN components can be issued from a ZEN Rexx program, as well as any z/OS, VTAM, or other product command.

REXX may have had humble beginnings, with Mike Cowlishaw working in his own time, but it has gone on to conquer the world (metaphorically) and is now in regular use, in different incarnations, on just about every platform imaginable, including your smartphone and tablet.

10 years at iTech-Ed Ltd

2014 is a bit of a special year here at iTech-Ed Ltd. It was our 10th anniversary on 1 February. I thought you might be interested in some of the changes that have taken place in that time.

Before we set up iTech-Ed Ltd, I had worked for Xephon for 18 years. Xephon ran briefings on mainframe topics, ran surveys on mainframe topics, and created user guides to things like databases. In 1986, they decided to try a small publication by CICS professionals for CICS professionals. They called it CICS Update. It sold very well – remember there was no Google or Internet in those days and it was difficult to easily get your hands on working bits of code and alternative solutions to common problems. VM Update followed in 1987, and then a whole range of mainframe-based publications. I was there at the very beginning and over the next 18 years edited most of them.

In 2004, Xephon sold the name and the publications to TCI publications. We set up iTech-Ed and we got the contract to edit around five or six of these Updates each month. My first activity, at one minute after midnight on 1 February 2004, was to upload the new issues to the Web site.

Over the next three and half years, iTech-Ed was responsible for encouraging technical people to write articles, editing and checking them to produce each edition every month, paying contributors, and sending the publications to the printers and putting them on the Web site. A small team of experts checked the text for punctuation and grammar as well as technical accuracy.

At the same time, iTech-Ed was carrying out consultancy work and producing technical documentation that was used in-house by a number of well-known companies. And we also started blogging at Mainframe Update using Blogger and Mainframe World on IT Toolbox

Towards the end of 2007, the Updates ceased publication, and the very first Virtual IMS user group meeting was held using Webex. The user group was immediately very popular and was sponsored by NEON Enterprise Software. That year also saw a growth in number of companies using our Web design and development services.

In 2008 the company took its first steps in offering advice on social media and how organizations could use it both to get their message out there and also to interact with customers in a positive way. It was a hard job back then. I also qualified as a Microsoft Office trainer – MOS MI – and ran a number of on-site training courses.

We picked up the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook – the de facto reference work for mainframers – and have worked with Arcati for many years producing this. The 2014 edition is now available from arcati.com/newyearbook14.

I was made an IBM Champion in 2009 and have been a champion every year since. As well as producing internal documentation for companies, I have had numerous articles published in a variety of Web-based and printed publications, such as Enterprise Tech Journal. In 2010 I attended Microsoft SharePoint Administrator and Developer training. And I started my regular blog on Destination z in July 2011, where I’ve written about Big Data , the Internet of Things, Deep Learning, and, of course, mainframes.

Also in 2011, Fundi Software took over as sponsor of the Virtual IMS user group and we then launched the Virtual CICS user group. Both of them enjoy regular meetings and newsletters and have around 400 members. I chair both of these user groups, and we use Citrix GoToMeeting to facilitate the webinars.

Over recent years, we’ve published guest blogs and I’ve ghost written blogs for many other blog sites. I’ve also contributed to IBM’s IOD blogs for the past couple of years. And I’ve created podcasts for a number of different companies.

So, here we are – 2014. 10 years in business and still very much in demand and looking forward to the future. If you want to get in contact with us, our Web site is itech-ed.com or you can e-mail trevor@itech-ed.com. You can Like us on Facebook at fb.com/itech-ed, follow me on Twitter at @t_eddolls, connect on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/teddolls, or follow us on Google+ at google.com/+TrevorEddolls.

2013 at iTech-Ed Ltd

Because it’s the start of the New Year, I thought I’d review the events of 2013 through the lens of events at iTech-Ed Ltd.

In January, The Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2013 was published. It had around 20,000 downloads during the course of the year, and I’m Editorial Director for this highly-respected annual source of mainframe information. My article entitled, “IMS: Stretching Across Computing Platforms and Applications” was published in Enterprise Tech Journal. My blog, “Needing That Network Guy”, was published on the Destination z Web site. And the Virtual CICS user group meeting on 15 January had a presentation from IBM’s Nick Garrod and Ted Caffarelli entitled, “CICS V5.1 – Portfolio Update”.

On 5 February, the Virtual IMS user group enjoyed a presentation from SQData’s Scott Quillicy entitled, “Best practices: maximizing the use of your IMS data through replication”. My blog entitled. “What’s Skeuomorphism and Why Should I Care?” was published on the Destination z Web site. And at the very end of February, I heard that I had been recognized by IBM as a 2013 IBM Champion – that’s the fifth year in succession.

5 March saw a great presentation by Fundi Software’s Reuben Andrews to the Virtual CICS user group entitled “No more Cold Start surprises – how Deployment Analysis in IBM CICS Configuration Manager for z/OS saves your bacon”. My blog entitled, “What is the ‘Third Platform?’” was published on the Destination z Web site.

My blog “Linux All the Way Down” was published on the Destination z Web site in April. And on 9 April, the Virtual IMS user group heard a presentation from James Martin of Fundi Software entitled “IMS Configuration Manager: streamlining the transition to dynamic resource definition”.

In May, my blog “The Internet of Things” was published on the Destination z Web site. And on 14 May, at the Virtual CICS user group meeting, HostBridge Technology’s Director of Technical Services, James Alexander, gave a presentation entitled, “Integrating Life-Comm, Life/70, or other CICS resident insurance and annuity applications with distributed applications utilizing the ACORD standard”.

There was a great presentation to the Virtual IMS user group on 11 June entitled, “Taking IMS to New Heights – What the Future Holds for IMS” by Betty Patterson, IMS Chief Architect with IBM. Also in June, my blog entitled, “Biological computers” was published on the Destination z Web site.

The Virtual CICS user group meeting on 11 July was packed with people enjoying a terrific presentation from IBM’s CICS and CICS Tools Technical Specialist, Satish Tanna, entitled, “Extracting optimum performance out of CICS”. The session was introduced by Ted Caffarelli, CICS Tools Product Line Manager with IBM. In addition, July saw my blog entitled, “IMS 13 Aims to Reach New Heights”, published on the Destination z Web site.

In August, my article entitled, “Strategies for Migrating Your Mainframe to IPv6” was published in Enterprise Tech Journal. And my blog entitled, “The Ongoing Evolution of Cognitive Computing”, was published on the Destination z Web site. The meeting of the Virtual IMS user group on 6 August enjoyed a presentation from Rocket Software’s Wayne Morton entitled, “Putting IMS/DB in Business Analytics / Intelligence”.

In September, my blog “Security Threats Require Constant Vigilance Even on the Mainframe” appeared on the Destination z Web site. Also in September, my blog, Lync and Yammer, appeared here on the IT Central Station Web site. And on 10 September, the Virtual CICS user group meeting was enthralled by a presentation entitled, “Creating Modern CICS Web Applications by Exploiting Open Source Javascript Libraries” from Stephen Mitchell, Managing Director of Matter of Fact Software Limited.

BMC Software’s Glenn Witt gave a good presentation to the 8 October meeting of the Virtual IMS user group entitled, “Tuning Your Mainframe IMS Batch Processing”. In the same month, my blog, “Looking forward to IOD 2013”, appeared on the IOD 2013 Web site. And my blog, “An Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Big Data”, was published on the Destination z Web site.

In November, my blog, “What is Bring Your Own Identity?”, was published on the Destination z Web site. My blogs, “What’s been happening at IOD?” and “IOD 2013: What you missed!”, were published on the IOD 2013 Web site. Also, on 12 November, the Virtual CICS user group meeting was packed to hear a presentation entitled, “Programming with CICS TS Channels and Containers” from CreativeDataMovers’ Mary Abdill.

The 3 December meeting of the Virtual IMS user group enjoyed a presentation entitled, “IMS in the Connected World – Why You Should Pay Attention!” from Dusty Rivers, Principal Technical Architect with GT Software. And my final blog of the year, “Fat Clients Ride Again”, appeared on the Destination z Web site.

I continued to blog at Mainframe Update (mainframeupdate.blogspot.com) and Mainframe World (it.toolbox.com/blogs/mainframe-world/). And I continued to tweet at twitter.com/t_eddolls, twitter.com/virtualims, and twitter.com/virtualcics. And on Facebook you can find me at fb.com/itech-ed, fb.com/VirtualIMS, and fb.com/VirtualCICS. And I have groups on LinkedIn for Virtual IMS (www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=379256) and Virtual CICS (www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=3847862). And I’m on Google plus (gplus.to/teddolls).

And don’t forget, the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2014, will be published very shortly. And look out for this year’s meetings of the Virtual IMS and Virtual CICS user groups.
Trevor Eddolls

Death of the green screen

As classic mainframe subsystems, such as IMS and CICS, start planning what to do for their 50th birthdays, it comes as a bit of a surprise to not only find that so many green screens are still in use within organizations, but, perhaps even more surprisingly as I found at a recent technical conference, so many sysprogs were saying that they felt happier using green screens. For them, anything else was just a fancy add on. They liked working close to the bare metal (as it were). Well, I have some bad news for them. I predict the death of the green screen in 2014!

Ignoring the fact that many mainframe experts have a 5 or a 6 as the first digit in their age, ignoring the fact that they are completely familiar with the green screens they use, and they have been using them for the greater part of their working life. I believe that mainframe display screens will start to look modern – as though they were designed in 2014 and not 1964 – because that’s what most people will want.

Think about your life style for the moment. You expect to get online and do banking at any time – that’s using a mainframe. You expect to be able to book a flight whenever you want – that’s another mainframe. You simply expect to be able to work at any time that suits you on any device that’s to hand – a laptop, tablet, smartphone. And large organizations want to be able to continue enjoying the benefits of their mainframe. So let’s put those together.

For many people, they simply want to use their browser to ‘see’ what’s going on inside the mainframe. And that browser could be on any of a number of platforms. People just want it to work. It’s got to be platform agnostic, and it would be really be useful if the display took into account the screen size of the device being used to run the browser software.

One way to do that is for the mainframe application to use JSON to send information to an HTML server (also on the mainframe) that then sends out pages to the browser. Using, for example, knockout.js it’s possible to take JSON data and format it with sophisticated client-side interactivity. In other words, it makes it look very modern – and is very useful.

Another solution is to create mobile apps. Software AG has webMethods, which offers, they claim, secure, high-performance communication infrastructure that combines message-queueing capabilities with built-in support for synchronous request/reply and conversational communication. It provides wrapping technology and programming interfaces that can turn existing application functions into business services. Business logic and security functions can be applied to information before it is supplied to a mobile app and before information from the mobile app is applied to the target (core) database.

Software AG suggests that this approach is ideal for managing interactions for tightly-coupled, time-critical user applications. Their examples are a sales representative wanting to check a buyer’s credit or a consumer looking for an insurance quote for their car. Any activity that requires the mobile user to enter information that is sent back to the core application for processing and which then returns a result would benefit from this approach.

Of course, once you go down the app route, you need an app for Android, and app for Windows 8, and app for Blackberry, an app for Apple IOS, etc.

The other reason that I predict the death of green screens is the growth of younger developers who expect a graphical interface. They want programming to be a drag-and-drop activity. It shouldn’t be any harder to use a mainframe than it is to use a games console, or a tablet device, or anything else. It should be intuitive. The software should ‘nudge’ you towards doing whatever task you appear to be doing. That’s where skeuomorphism comes in – making on-screen icons look like real world devices, so using them is more intuitive. And the software should display results in a way that makes drilling down for more information quick and intuitive. And it may be that the software is designed for touch screens.

There’s a very old Star Trek film (Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home) where Scotty sits down in front of a current computer (it was 1986) and talks to it – nothing happens. Someone gives him the mouse to use, and Scotty speaks into the mouse! We’re used to Siri and other voice interfaces. Maybe soon things like Nuance’s Dragon NaturallySpeaking will be available for everyone to use. But, for the moment, I’m simply predicting coloured screens everywhere (and the green screens will be gone).

If you do celebrate Christmas – have a great one. And if you don’t, have a great time anyway!

Optimum performance from CICS

The July meeting of the Virtual CICS user group included a presentation entitled, “Extracting optimum performance out of CICS”, and was presented by Satish Tanna, IBM’s CICS and CICS Tools Technical Specialist. The session was introduced by Ted Caffarelli, CICS Tools Product Line Manager with IBM.

Satish told the user group that he would be talking about using CICS Tools to help with CICS Threadsafe and consolidation projects.

Being threadsafe modernizes CICS applications and reduces TCB switching and CPU usage. It also increases the number of simultaneous CICS tasks that can run in a single CICS region, which reduces the need for vast numbers of CICS systems, and saves on the cost of administering those systems and other overheads. It also better exploits modern z-Series hardware.

Each TCB switch is approximately 2000 instructions. CICS TS V5.1, non-threadsafe DB2, MQ, and IMS transactions switch TCBs for each SQL statement or MQ command. So reducing instruction path length reduces costs and saves money for an organization.

CICS Tools can help to create threadsafe applications. Satish Tanna suggested that there are four stages in creating a threadsafe application. Step 1 is to identify applications that have a high number of TCB switches and identify programs in those transactions that are good threadsafe candidates.

Step 2 is to analyse programs to ensure the logic is threadsafe. Step 3 is to implement threadsafe programs. And the final step is to measure the results. CICS PA can be used for steps 1 and 4. CICS IA can be used for step 2. And CICS CM can be used for step 3.

CICS Performance Analyzer (PA) can analyse your CICS applications to determine which ones are good candidates for threadsafe. It looks at how many switches occurred, how much CPU time was used, delays, and how much they cost.

CICS Interdependency Analyzer (IA) can be used to determine the cause of a high number of Change TCB modes. It looks at what commands are issued by the transaction, how many commands are threadsafe, whether there are any DB2, MQ, or IMS commands, whether there are any Dynamic COBOL commands, whether there are any inhibiting commands, and which commands cause a TCB swap and where they are in the sequence of events.

Sites can also use CICS IA to verify that program logic is threadsafe. It looks for serialization techniques when accessing shared resources, enqueue and dequeue, compare and swap, reviews usage of ADDRESS CWA, EXTRACT EXIT, and GETMAIN SHARED. CICS will provide threadsafe access to its resources, eg files and queues.

CICS Configuration Manager (CM) Packaging, Transformation, and Migration facilities can be used to manage programs.

CICS PA can then be used to compare the results using the CICS PA Transaction Profile Report. This can quickly show a comparison between before and after the threadsafe project.

When it comes to consolidation, Satish Tanna told the user group that using CICS TS V5.1 scalability can consolidate CICS systems to simplify management. New and improved capabilities in CICS TS V5.1 provide greater single region scalability by doubling the MAXTASK limit to 2000. There’s greater usage of 64-bit storage and reduced usage of 24-bit storage. There’s greater application parallelism through threadsafe API and SPI extensions. There’s greater system parallelism through optimized TCB usage. There are Java performance improvements from 64-bit Java 7 support. And there’s greater access to 64-bit application storage when using Assembler programs.

CICS Deployment Assistant (DA) can discover CICS and CICSPlex system topology. CICS IA can analyse application resources and interdependencies. CICS CM can implement region consolidation, including CSD and CPSM BAS resources. CICS PA can measure performance.

CICS DA will discover Sysplex, CICS assets, and other address spaces. It can visualize assets and interconnections graphically. And it can export discovery data for reporting.

More information about the Virtual CICS user group can be found at http://fundi.com/virtualcics/.

Wisdom of crowds?

There’s a theory that if you take into account the collective opinion of a group of individuals rather than a single expert, then the large group’s aggregated answers to questions involving just about anything is typically just as good as, and often better than, the answer given by any individual expert within the group. This is called the wisdom of the crowd.

Of course, so-called experts aren’t necessarily that expert. Most complicated court cases seem to involve expert witnesses disagreeing over the right conclusions to draw from the evidence. Similarly, psychology studies have found, for example, that experienced parole board members are no better at deciding whether a prisoner will offend again than ordinary members of the public. Worryingly, other studies have found similar results with experts being no better using their expertise than members of the public.

So what has this got to do with anything? Well, as you probably have guessed from these blogs, I’ve been doing a lot of work on social media recently with companies and charity groups. We were chatting about how to use LinkedIn, and they wanted to take a look at my profile to see what areas of expertise people thought I had. If you want to play along at home, the URL is http://www.linkedin.com/in/teddolls. At the bottom of the page is the skills and expertise section. The way it works is LinkedIn members can endorse the skills or expertise of others. And, gradually, using the wisdom of crowds, a person’s expertise profile should, pretty much, match up with their real-life skills and expertise – you’d think!

So, I listed my skills – an embarrassing process in itself – and then we compared them to what ‘the crowd’ think are my skills. I thought as I’ve been blogging since 2005, and I blog on the Destination z site each month, and I’ve written blogs that have been published as written by other people, ‘blogger’ ought to be there. I write articles that have been published in numerous publications and Web sites, so ‘writer’ ought to be there. I edited Xephon’s Update journals for 20 years and I’m editorial director for the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook, so ‘editor’ should be there. I’ve been associated with mainframes for thirty years, so ‘mainframes’ should be there. I chair the Virtual IMS user group and Virtual CICS user group – so ‘CICS’ and ‘IMS’ should be there.

I’ve also done coaching work with individuals, and a few years ago qualified as a hypnotherapist. I’ve also passed NLP exams. I see clients for these, so ‘hypnotherapy’ and ‘NLP’ should be there. And, for the past five years, I’ve been designing and building Web sites for people – so ‘Web designer’ should be there. And, of course, with my recent focus on it, ‘social media’ should be right up there.

The actual scores on the doors suggest a slightly different profile: 14 Mainframe, 14 CICS, 12 Hypnotherapy, 9 Technical writing, 9 NLP, and 9 IMS DB/DC. Blogging has only 5 votes; as well as technical writing, I have 6 for writer; 5 for editing; and yet I have no endorsements for social media or Web design!

Now, I know it’s still early days, and there aren’t that many endorsements at all yet, and probably, over time, the endorsements will come to match the work I’m actually doing, but it did seem surprising that it should be so different, with some area of ‘expertise’ so lacking in any endorsements. I just wondered whether other people were finding the same thing.

Or maybe, it’s me. Maybe I have an incorrect idea of what I am good at, and there is wisdom in the crowd!

2012 at iTech-Ed Ltd

As it’s the start of the New Year, I thought I’d review events of 2012 through the lens of events at iTech-Ed Ltd.

In January, The Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2012 was published. It had around 20,000 downloads during the course of the year, and I’m Editorial Director for this highly-respected annual source of mainframe information. My blog, “Gazing into the IT Crystal Ball...”, was published on the Destination z Web site. And the Virtual CICS user group meeting on 17 January had a presentation from IBM Hursley’s Andrew Smithson entitled, “CICS Transaction Gateway V8.1”.

In February, my blog “Staying in Touch With the Mainframe Community” was published on the Destination z Web site, and an earlier blog was quoted from on the Dancing Dinosaur site. The Virtual IMS user group had a presentations from Neil Price, a senior DBA and systems programmer with TNT Express ICS on 7 February. His talk was entitled, “Memoirs of a HALDBA”.

My article entitled: “The z114: Delivering Game-Changing Opportunities” was published in the March/April issue of z/Journal. My blog “Saving Money With Mainframes” can be found on the Destination z Web site. And of the 6 March, the Virtual CICS user group meeting had a presentation from Fundi Software’s Jim Martin entitled, “Analyzing CICS function shipping applications using Transaction Analysis Workbench”.

3 April saw a presentation to the Virtual IMS user group by Fundi Software’s James Martin, entitled, “Using IMS Performance Solution Pack for z/OS to analyze IMS performance problems”. And my blog “The Sincerest Form of Flattery” was published on the Destination z Web site.

In May, my blog “The Mainframe’s Potential to Get Social” was published on the Destination z Web site. And on 8 May, at the Virtual CICS user group meeting, Stephen Mitchell, Managing Director of Matter of Fact Software Limited, gave a presentation entitled, “Utilizing the Dojo Toolkit for Web browser-driven applications from CICS”.

The 12 June saw a presentation by GT Software’s Dusty Rivers to the Virtual IMS user group entitled, “Modernizing IMS”. And the Destination z Web site published my blog “Atomic Weapons and the Dawn of the Computer Age”.

On 10 July, Ezriel Gross, CEO of Circle Software Inc, gave a presentation to the Virtual CICS user group entitled, “CICS introduction to Web services for the system programmer”. Also in July, my blog “IBM and Augmented Reality” was published on the Destination z Web site.

The Virtual IMS user group enjoyed a presentation by SQData’s CEO, Scott Quillicy, on 7 August entitled, “Best practices: IMS to relational data movement”. My blog “BYOD and Network Security” was published on the Destination z Web site in August.

In September, my blog “IMS: There’s Still Life in the Old Dog!” appeared on the Destination z Web site. Also in September, the Virtual CICS user group enjoyed a presentation entitled, “Success paths for integrating CICS with new technologies” from Don Spoerke, Principle Solutions Engineer with GT Software.

October saw my blog “What’s New With CICS?” published here on the Destination z Web site. In the same month, IBM’s “Think BIG” Information On Demand conference site published “IOD from Afar” and “IOD News” on their official IOD blog site.

In November, Colin Pearce gave a very enjoyable and detailed presentation to the Virtual CICS user group about “CICS security”. The IBM ‘Proud to be part of z’ poster came out that month. Look out for the person in the bottom row, third from the left! And the Destination z Web site published my blog “New Poster Captures the Mainframer Mosiac”.

On 4 December, the Virtual IMS user group had a presentation by BMC’s Bill Chapin about “Nearing 24x7 availability with structure changes too!” Also in December, Trevor’s blog “Whatever Happened to the Network Guy?” was published on the Destination z Web site.

Also last year, I was made a 2012 IBM Champion – that’s four years in a row I’ve been an IBM Champion. I continued to blog at mainframeupdate.blogspot.com and it.toolbox.com/blogs/mainframe-world/. And I continued to tweet at twitter.com/t_eddolls, twitter.com/virtualims, and twitter.com/virtualcics. And on Facebook you can find me at fb.com/itech-ed, fb.com/VirtualIMS, and fb.com/VirtualCICS. And I have groups on LinkedIn for Virtual IMS (www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=379256) and Virtual CICS (www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=3847862) – come on LinkedIn, do short names! And I’m on Google plus (if you like, you can find me at gplus.to/teddolls).

And don’t forget, the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2013, will be published very shortly. And look out for this year’s meetings of the Virtual IMS and Virtual CICS user groups.

Trevor Eddolls

Shopping

It seems that as you get closer to Christmas and the New Year, everything starts to run down like an old clockwork toy. Meetings scheduled for 2013 seem ages away, even though some are at the beginning of January. And phone calls so often find the person you’re ringing out of the office – whether that’s doing a bit of family shopping or attending the numerous party and lunch invitations. And as for e-mail, people seem to leave their out-of-office message on permanently!

To be honest, I’ve been closeted away trying to get the bulk of the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook 2013 sorted out. I’ve been calculating the numbers for the user survey – and very interesting they are too. But I’ll talk more about them next year. I’ve been busy placing articles and organizing entries for vendors and consultants in the appropriate sections. So, no partying for me this week. BTW if you wanted to be included in the Yearbook, e-mail me immediately here.

I’ve also been working away at a speaker programme for the Virtual IMS user group and the Virtual CICS user group. The first meeting is on 15 January when IBM speakers will talk about the CICS V5.1 - Portfolio Update. But, as I say, it’s in January and seems an age away! If you or your company are interested presenting to either group during the year, then let me know here.

It seems that no matter whether you’re Christian, atheist, agnostic, or a person of any other faith, everyone likes a present from Father Christmas (Santa). So what do you buy the IT guy who seems to have pretty much everything? Somehow socks just don’t seem to show any real thought. Alcohol is usually well received, as are things from the more expensive end of the catalogue. But I’ve got a couple of other suggestions.

I’ve been playing with a magic magnetic balls cube. It’s 216 small magnetic balls that you can shape into all sorts of 3D things. And then you can scrunch them all up and start again. But the really hard part, is getting them back into the cube shape. Remember magnets repel as well as attract. So you can play with them for ages.

I’ve also been working with a variety of organizations on social media – getting Facebook fan pages set up, starting using Twitter, and putting videos on Youtube. And I found the like and dislike Facebook-like stamps can be quite fun. Whatever happened to the paperless office? As documents pass across my desk, I can (mainly for my own amusement) stamp them with a Like or Dislike (thumbs up or thumbs down). You’ll probably enjoy doing much the same!

There are lots more ideas at www.paramountzone.com, such as touch-screen gloves, iHat music hat, USB mug warmer, flying monkeys, a one million pound bank note, alcohol breath tester keyring, tap shower radio, and light changing glow ball.

And, for the mainframer in your life, you could try to get hold of a “Proud to be part of z” poster. You can see a copy here.

So, whatever you’re doing over the next couple of weeks, have a great time. See you next year.

CICS communication history

In the beginning, CICS programmers used conversational transactions – but not any more. Pseudo-conversational coding is less resource-intensive, user think time costs are eliminated, and sites can run more simultaneous transactions. On the down side, programming is more difficult, application design requires re-starting programs, it’s more difficult to debug programs, and programs require an area to store data between tasks.
 
And so we get the Communication Area (COMMAREA). It’s a terminal-based scratchpad that’s dynamic in size (0 to 32,500 bytes), and is private and chained to the terminal. The COMAREA can hold data between pseudo-conversations, has a maximum in size of 32K, can be passed from program to program, can be empty, partially full, or full, and is automatically cleaned up when not used.

However, COMMAREAs have obvious limitations, and so IBM gave us channels and containers. There are no size limitations on data in containers, the number of containers in a channel is unlimited, and there can be separate containers for input and output.
Another way round COMMAREA limitations is to use an XML (eXtensible Mark-up Language) front-end application. Associated with this are:

• Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT) is the recommended style sheet language of XML.
• XML namespaces – in XML, element names are defined by a developer.
• XML schema is an XML document that describes the structure and constrains the contents of other XML documents.
• XML parser is a program that is invoked by an application to process an XML document, ensure that it meets all the rules of XML as well as the syntax of the DTD or schema, making the data available to the calling application.

With the introduction of Services Oriented Architecture (SOA), programmers now use CICS Web services. A Web service is a collection of operations that are network accessible through standardized XML messaging. The Web services architecture is based on interactions between three components: a service provider, which is the platform that hosts access to the service; a service requester, which is the application that is looking for and invoking or initiating an interaction with a service; and service registry, which is a place where service providers publish their service descriptions, and where service requesters find them.

Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) is a specification for distributed Web-based information registries of Web services. The service provider “owns” the service, creates the WSDL (Web Service Description Language – see below), publishes the WSDL, and processes the requests. The service requester “finds” the service, binds to the service, and invokes the service using the WSDL. The service registry hosts the service description and is optional for statically bound requesters.

WSDL is an XML application for describing Web services. WSDL comprises:

• Types – the data types in the form of XML schemas
• Message – an abstract definition of the data in the form of a message
• PortType – an abstract set of operations mapped to one or more end points
• Binding – the concrete protocol and data formats for the operations
• Service – a collection of related end points.

Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is an XML-based protocol for the exchange of information in a distributed environment. A SOAP message is encoded as an XML document.
 
The CICS Web services assistant is a set of batch utilities that can help users transform existing CICS applications into Web services and to enable CICS applications to use Web services provided by external providers. The CICS Web services assistant comprises two utility programs:

• DFHLS2WS generates a Web service binding file from a language structure. This utility also generates a Web service description.
• DFHWS2LS generates a Web service binding file from a Web service description. This utility also generates a language structure that you can use in your application programs.

You can use Rational Developer for System z for Web services and XML development. A CICS pipeline is responsible for dealing with SOAP headers. It’s implemented as a series of programs, and can be configured by end users by using message handlers. A message handler is a program in which you can perform your own processing of Web service requests and responses.

300 blogs

This is my 300th blog. I thought it was a high enough number to deserve some sort of recognition. And I thought it would be an opportunity to look back on all the things that have happened since that very first blog back in June 2006.

In those days, I was doing a lot of work for Xephon – I was producing and editing the Update journals. You probably remember MVS (later z/OS) Update, CICS Update (the very first one), DB2 Update, SNA (later TCP/SNA) Update, RACF Update, and WebSphereMQ Update. My very first blog on the Mainframe Weekly blog site and was called “What’s going on with CICS?”. The first paragraph read:

What do I mean, what’s going on with CICS? Well, CICS used to be the dynamic heart of so many companies – it was the subsystem that allowed the company to make money – and as such there were lots of third parties selling add-ons to CICS to make it work better for individual organizations.

And over the months that followed, I talked about AJAX, Web 2.0, Project ECLipz, Aglets (DB2 agent applets), social networking, back-ups and archives, new versions of CICS, DB2, and IMS, and significant birthdays for software. I blogged about mash-ups using IMS, I gave a number of CSS tips, I wrote about BPEL, I even discussed PST files and the arrival of the Chrome browser. And back in November 2008 I first looked at cloud computing.

In 2009 I talked about CICS Explorer, Twitter, cloud computing, specialty processors, zPrime, mainframe apprentices, that year’s GSE conference, IBM’s London Analytics Solution Centre,  more anniversaries and software updates, and much more.

2010 saw more blogs about the recession, IBM versus Oracle, social media, Linux, clouds, performance, the zEnterprise, some thoughts about SharePoint, Android, and connecting to your mainframe from a phone, SyslogD, GSE Conference, and lots of other thoughts on the events of the year.

2011 had a lot of blogs about cloud computing and virtual user groups, as well as more about SharePoint. The SharePoint blogs were also published on the Medium Sized Business Blog part of TechNet Blogs (http://blogs.technet.com/b/mediumbusiness/). I also had a serious look at tablets. And wrote the “What’s a mainframe, Daddy?” blog. I had a look at IMS costs, mainframe maintenance, and Web 3.0 and Facebook (with the use of OpenGraph). I also examined gamification and augmented reality and what they meant for the future of software.

So far in 2012 I’ve mentioned IBM Docs, how to create an e-book, BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), operating systems on a memory stick, cloud wars, and using the Dojo Toolkit to make the end user experience of CICS nicer, and more friendly (of course).

Over the years there have been frequent blogs about the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook, and in particular its user survey results.

I’ve also written guest blogs for other people, and I’ve published guest blogs by others. You can find a number of blogs I’ve written on the Destination z Web site at http://destinationz.org/. I’ve even written a fair few blogs (for a fee) that have been published and attributed to other people!

Are the blogs any good? Should you be reading them? Well, I have an IT Toolbox gold award for blogging – for over 100 blogs. Perhaps more importantly, I was a finalist in the Individual IT Professional Male category of the Computer Weekly IT blog awards in 2009. I was a finalist in the IT Professional (male) category in 2010. And last year I was ‘shortlisted’ in the Computer Weekly IT Professional blogger category. As well as being shortlisted for awards, these blogs are regularly referred to by other bloggers and journalists.

You can read my blogs at mainframeupdate.blogspot.com, it.toolbox.com/blogs/mainframe-world/, and www.mainframecobol.info/. You can follow on Twitter at twitter.com/t_eddolls, or on Facebook at fb.com/iTechEd.

What about the future? The blogs continue – I’ll mainly be following what’s happening with the mainframe industry, but I’ll also take a wider view and keep abreast of new technologies and ideas as they happen and try to put them in context and give my evaluation of them.

If you have read all 300 – thank you. If this is the first one you’ve read, then hopefully you’ll be back again next week for more!

Trevor Eddolls
IBM Champion

Making it look nice for CICS users

Let’s look at an archetypal MVS site. Kenny wrote most of the original Assembler and quite a bit of the COBOL code that drove the business all those years ago. He was a big man and a real hippie. He even came to work in his sandals and decorated his office with album covers. He thought that writing comments in code was just a waste of time. Doug, who took over from Kenny was an absolute troglodyte. Whereas Kenny was fun to go for a drink with – and boy could he drink – Doug was forever under the floor connecting high speed back-up technology that no-one else really understood. He was great because he’d help everyone with code problems, but he seldom turned up to meetings or understood the concept of budgets. But everything worked like a dream and the company made money.

Nowadays we’ve got Ross heading up software on our z/OS CICS system. He does attend meetings – lots of them. He’s on the committee at a local user group and he’s given presentations at SHARE. He’s even got a wife and children! The problem is that much of the code that Ross looks after is quite old and doesn’t have many comments. There was an effort in 1999 to document everything, but it’s now out-of-date since the SOA (Services-Oriented Architecture) project.

The trouble at many sites is that their Ross is kept very busy at the mainframe end of his CICS system and thinks that the bit of AJAX on the Web browser front-end is enough to keep the end users happy. The truth is, end users are never happy! So what if someone at a conference told Ross there was an easy way (well, perhaps not easy, but fairly straightforward certainly) to make the end user experience of his CICS applications look like it was written in 2012 and not 1912!?!? Do you think Ross would be interested?

Before we look at what this amazing solution might be, let’s briefly look at Web design. Back in 1999, a Web site was pretty much made up of static pages. Someone wrote the pages in HTML and, over time, people updated the information on those pages. Then we had PHP and MySQL. This provided a database that users could update as necessary, and the PHP pages pulled out the latest information. They still looked like static pages, but they were easier to update. Then, we had JavaScript that gave us programming capabilities and all the flexibility that goes with that. Then we had JQuery, which was JavaScript with all the hard work already done for us. You’ve seen Web sites with JQuery-like effects – the ability to click on a thumbnail image and see it large in the middle of the page while much of the rest of the screen is covered with a semi-transparent layer. An example would be clicking on a photo in Facebook.

So let’s tell Ross about the Dojo Toolkit from the Dojo Foundation. Now at Version 1.7, the Web site at http://dojotoolkit.org/ says: “Dojo saves you time and scales with your development process, using web standards as its platform. It’s the toolkit experienced developers turn to for building high quality desktop and mobile web applications.” Now, suppose there was some way to plug that into CICS. So while Ross was looking after the CICS applications, Dojo was making sure that the end users had a good experience.

The Virtual CICS user group (www.fundi.com/virtualcics/) heard from Stephen Mitchell, Managing Director of Matter of Fact Software Limited, earlier this month. He gave a talk entitled: “Utilizing the Dojo Toolkit for Web browser-driven applications from CICS”, which really got to grips with how CICS and the Dojo Toolkit could be integrated. The base functionality of the Dojo Toolkit is made available to a Web page by including a link to dojo.js. This includes plenty of features like CSS-based queries, event handling, animations, AJAX, class-based programming, and a package system that makes getting access to the rest of Dojo very easy.

There are additional stable (but optional) components for advanced animations, I/O, data, drag-and-drop, and much more with Dojo Core. Dijit is Dojo’s theme-able, accessible, easy-to-customize UI library. Dijit requires Dojo Base and various Dojo Core modules to use. It allows for the creation of widgets. For the more adventurous, there’s DojoX, which contains a number of sub-projects based on the Dojo Base. Each project has a varying states of maturity – from very stable and robust to alpha.

Stephen’s company recognized a need to control the Dojo Toolkit that was being used by their PlexSpy application status monitor product. And they decided that if it was an issue for them, it was most likely an issue for others. So they created a generic server solution that could be used by anyone with CICS on z/OS. As a consequence, the Dojo Toolkit has been taken into the mainframe environment and is served from CICS out of PDSs. This brings the strengths of the mainframe to sites using the Dojo Toolkit – providing the control over it that those sites needed.

Ross can now put his feet up at home with his family knowing that his end users are happy with their working environment. And the code Kenny and Doug wrote is still doing its job for another generation.

2011 at iTech-Ed Ltd

Well, as another year comes partying to an end, and everyone stops checking their e-mails on their smartphones or tablets and finally starts to let their hair down and enjoy a glass of something alcoholic, I thought I’d review the year through the lens of my company – iTech-Ed Ltd (www.itech-ed.com).

January started the year, as most Januaries do, with the publication of the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook. The 2011 edition is still available for download from www.arcati.com/newyearbook11. The 2012 edition will be available in a couple of weeks. As always the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook  includes its annual user survey, an up-to-date directory of vendors and consultants, a media guide, a strategy section with papers on mainframe trends and directions, a glossary of terminology, and a technical specification section. And each year, it gets downloaded by around 15,000 mainframe professionals.

February saw the launch of the new series of Virtual IMS user group meetings. The user group is now sponsored by Fundi Software and hosted at www.fundi.com/virtualims. The first speaker was Jim Martin from Fundi Software, whose presentation was called, “Solving the problem when IMS isn't the cause”.

In March, everyone seemed to be talking about cloud computing.

April’s meeting of the Virtual IMS user group included a presentation from Ron Haupert, a Senior Technologist with Rocket Software. His talk was called, “Simplify and improve database administration by leveraging your storage system”.

In May, Mark Lillycrop, Director of Arcati Ltd and I took part in a ‘Scheduled Chat’ in the ‘House of Mainframe’ section of CA’s May Mainframe Madness month. May also witnessed the launch of the new Virtual CICS user group – again sponsored by Fundi – with its Web site at www.fundi.com/virtualcics. Our opening presentation was from Fundi’s Jim Martin talking about, “Solving the problem when CICS isn't the cause”.

In June, I was asked by ITToolbox to lead a discussion in the Data Center Infrastructure section of their Web site. At the Virtual IMS user group meeting, Gary Weinhold a Systems Engineer and Verna Bartlett Head of Marketing with Data Kinetics talked about, “MSU reduction due to in-memory table management with (any) IMS applications”.

In July, I was selected for the Destination z (www.destinationz.org/) member spotlight. The Virtual CICS user group saw a presentation from Jeff Geminder, Principal Consultant with CA, called, “Cross-enterprise application performance monitoring and CICS-specific drill-down: approaches to finding the performance problem needle in the heterogeneous haystack”. I was also a guest blogger on the Destination z Web site.

In August, my article CICS Top Performance and Tuning Issues was published in z/Journal. I had a guest blog published on Destination z. The Virtual IMS user group had a presentation from Scott Quillicy, CEO and Founder of SQData. His talk was called, “IMS replication for high-availability”.

For the September meeting, Charles Jones, from the Product Management group at Rocket Software, gave a talk to the Virtual CICS user group called, “CICS TS 4.2: Leveraging event processing and high-performance Java”. I wrote a guest blog for the Destination z Web site.

October saw a presentation from Rosemary Galvan, Principal Software Consultant – IMS, with BMC. Her talk to the Virtual IMS user group was called, “Database Performance – Could Have, Should Have, Would Have”. I had a guest blog on the Destination z Web site.

In November, my Mainframe Update blog at mainframeupdate.blogspot.com was a finalist in the Computer Weekly Social Media Awards 2011. Also in November the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook user survey was launched. And Eugene S Hudders, president of C\TREK Corp, gave a presentation to the Virtual CICS user group called, “CICS TS Performance – Tuning LSR Pools”. I also had a guest blog on the Destination z Web site.

And finally, in December, I had an article entitled, Ways to Save Money and Improve IT Services published in z/Journal. The final speaker for the year at the Virtual IMS user group was Suzie Wendler, a Consulting IT Specialist in the IBM IMS Advanced Technical Skills organization, who talked about, “IMS V12”. I chaired a webinar for SQData entitled, “How Important is Continous Availability of Critical Applications to Your Company?”And there was a guest blog on the Destination z Web site.

What else, well apart from a full year of writing and consultancy work,  I was made an IBM Champion for the third year running.

Looking forward to 2012, we have the launch of the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook in January, and a presentation from Andrew Smithson of IBM Hursley on CICS Transaction Gateway V8.1 for the Virtual CICS user group.

If you do celebrate it, Merry Christmas and a happy New Year. I’ll be back blogging in January.
Trevor Eddolls

Managing expectations

Have you ever been out for a few drinks with friends. Maybe you’ve had more to drink than usual. What happens next? Well the answer seems to depend on which country you and the people you’re drinking with come from.

It seems that in some countries, people take the view that alcohol is so strong and people are so weak that anything is permissible. You can stand up in court and explain your actions – whatever they may be – by saying that you’d drunk too much. In other countries – like Italy – alcohol is grouped with food in the minds of people. You drink when you eat. You eat and drink with your friends and family. Using the defence of excessive alcohol would seem as absurd as using the defence of having eaten too many burgers to explain antisocial behaviour.

And it’s exactly the same with users. If they expect nanosecond response times to a CICS transaction they will be miffed when a response takes a second or two. Whereas, if they are used to a response taking a few seconds, they will be pleased when it takes less than two seconds for their screen to refresh.

Managing expectations can be the difference between happy users and unhappy users. In the same way it can be the difference between alcoholic destruction of everything on the way home and a great night out.

Banks seem to use the opposite technique. They pretend that they offer great service, but as every customer knows, they don’t. The news is always full of demands that the banks should lone more – particularly to small businesses. Speaking as the owner of a small business, I think this is not the real problem. I think the problem for most small businesses is the fact that banks charge too much for their services.

Now I don’t mind banks charging for the work they do – that’s the same model I use to stay in business! What I object to is the amount they charge. And I think this is part of the problem most small businesses face. For example, here in the UK, I get a lot of dollar cheques from the USA. I get an exchange rate that’s clearly in the bank’s favour and then I get charged for paying the money into my account. I get charged for paying in UK cheques. And I get charged even more for paying in cash!

So I guess my expectations are that banks are going to rip me off. They do nothing to manage that and make things better. And they really are the reason that a lot of small businesses are having a hard time during this recession – or whatever we’re calling it.

Just revisiting the psychology again. There are experiments where two groups of students were given free drinks all evening. Both groups got equally drunk. Then the experimenters explained that one group had drunk alcohol and the other group hadn’t. Once this second group were told they hadn’t had any alcohol, they immediately sobered up. Their expectations changed completely and they now behaved in a different way.

So, while IT strives to offer the best service to its users. It’s important that conversations take place between the two groups so that users can describe their expectations of the service they want to receive, and IT can explain how the service is being delivered and give a realistic idea of what an end user shoould expect. Most sites have SLAs (Service Level Agreements), but these tend to be gathering dust somewhere rather than being constantly referred to. The importance of the conversation is to manage expectations and make sure both groups can continue to work, happy in the knowledge that they are getting or delivering the level of service that everyone expects.

Don’t forget that on Thursday 1 December there’s a webinar entitled: “How Important is the Continuous Availability of Your Critical Applications?” at 2pm GMT. You can register for the event at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/844029904.

And this is the last week that you can complete the Arcati Mainframe Yearbook user survey at http://www.arcati.com/usersurvey12. We need all the completed surveys by Friday evening.

He CICS, he scores!

Sadly, as a title, it only works if you’re in the parts of the world where CICS is pronounced ‘kicks’ and where people play football (and getting the ball in the back of the net is very important!). But wherever you are, I want to talk about IBM’s transaction processing system whose full title is Customer Information Control System and which runs under z/OS and z/VSE.

Basically, CICS allows users to sit at their screen and run transactions against data. It’s reckoned that about 90% of the Fortune 500 companies use CICS for banking, insurance, and various industrial systems. CICS is incredibly resilient with users potentially logging in through browsers, and the application programs they use being written in a wide variety of programming languages. The most recent version is CICS TS 4.2.

CICS first appeared in July 1969 – the year a man first walked on the moon and films such as Midnight Cowboy, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and True Grit were nominated for Oscars. The DFH prefix for CICS messages has been apocryphally attributed to stand for the Denver Foot Hills. Development of CICS has been at the Hursley UK site since 1974.

CICS programs were pseudo-conversational – which means that they appeared as if they were conversational, while actually not being. This design meant that valuable resources were not locked waiting for a user to respond to a message. In fact coding to maximize what could be done while using the minimum amount of resources was a trick that COBOL programmers were forced to learn. Programs were multi-threaded, which meant one copy of the code could be used by more than one transaction.

System calls to CICS (eg reading a record) originally required the use of a macro call – hence the name macro-level CICS. During the 1980s we got command-level CICS. Command-level-only CICS came in the 1990s and support for macro-level application programs went.

In terms of programming languages, early users had COBOL and PL/I, and, of course, Assembler. More recently, we’ve seen Enterprise Java Beans (EJB). CICS transactions can now be invoked using an HTTP request, so CICS transactions can act as servers in a POX or REST conversation. JCICS classes allow CICS services  to be called using Java. CICS programs can be Web service providers or requesters.

The new CICS Explorer Eclipse-based graphical tooling interface for CICS provides a modern-looking management interface to CICS.

If you are interested in finding out more about CICS, you’ll be interested in the Virtual CICS user group at www.fundi.com/virtualcics. You’ll also be very interested to know that there’s a user group meeting on Tuesday 12 July at 10:30 CDT. The meeting uses Citrix GoToMeeting so you don’t need to leave your desk, and will include a presentation by Jeff Geminder, who’s a Principal Consultant with CA. The title of the presentation is: Cross-enterprise application performance monitoring and CICS-specific drill-down: approaches to finding the performance problem needle in the heterogeneous haystack. Jeff says; “In today’s complex multi-platform world, how can businesses stay ahead of the curve by reducing outages and minimizing downtime? Specifically, how can we tell whether CICS is or is not the culprit. In effect how can we find that needle in the heterogeneous haystack and get the right people in the right place at the right time.”

To find out more and to get details about how to register for the webinar, go to www.fundi.com/virtualcics/meetings.htm.

Where do the tablets go?

So, your organization has a mainframe – had one for years – and everything is nicely locked down. You can recover almost up to the minute the system or subsystem crashed (which it hardly ever does), and you’ve got people who seem to know, almost by instinct these days, when something isn’t performing quite right.

On top of that, you’ve got another layer of IT. People who use laptops with Windows and/or people who use Linux, and possibly bits or Solaris dotted around. These people have more interesting lives. They have to fight to get the best performance. Their back-up strategy is good if they can recover to last night! They probably still insist on people using XP as their Windows operating system because Vista was no good and it’s a bit of a jump to Windows 7. Plus they’re probably coming to the end of a virtualization project to reduce the number of server boxes they’ve got lying around. Parhaps they’re installing Citrix to virtualize desktops, or SharePoint to produce an intranet and join up all the separate islands of computing.

Plus you’ve got remote users, who are logging in over somebody else’s wifi. Or they might be using the 3G network on their smartphone. It’s your fault, of course, because you spent so long changing your CICS and IMS applications so they could be used in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) environment. But, I guess you have strategies in place to secure the connection, and secure what applications they can run, and what data they can see.
In fact, you’re probably convincing senior managers in your organization that it really was their idea all along to combine the strengths of mainframe computing with the flexibility of distributed systems. What your organization needs is a nice z196 mainframe – perhaps one of the planned-but-not-quite-announced Business Class (BC) machines.

For those of you who’ve spent the past year on Mars, the z196 brings together the latest mainframe technology with POWER7 and x86 IBM blade systems, giving potential users z/OS, AIX, Linux, and (coming soon) Windows, all on the one box. At this stage, I should point out that there are very strong arguments for going to zLinux. It’s been around for 10 years now, and is just becoming an overnight success – as they say.

So, there you are thinking that you can use your mainframe experience and expertise to tidy up all the other computing areas in your organization and get them under your control when HR tells you they have supplied everyone on the board of directors with an iPad. Now, you might think this is a good opportunity to bring some of the board into the 21st century, but it creates yet another rip in the secure blanket you've been throwing over the company’s computing infrastructure. Can you set up a security policy for iPads? Well, yes, if they come into a Microsoft server – in the same way you would for Mac users. Can you allow board members to download apps? Or can they have only pre-approved ones? Where do you start building proper security? It’s back to herding cats!

And don’t think I’ve singled out iPads, Androids have similar issues. You can download firewalls and anti-virus software for them, but it’s not the same as RACF!

And it might not just be board members – you may still have road warriors that want the small form factor of a tablet. The issues of theft or forgetfulness compound your security problems.

My suggestion at this stage is to wait for Windows 8 tablets, and hope that the policies laid down by the non-mainframe ITers will apply to them. And by then, Windows will be running on our z196 box. So everyone’s a winner!

What’s a mainframe, Daddy?

After years of sliding my security card in the lock and entering the machine room/data centre and seeing the mainframes in there change from Sci-Fi-style boxes with flashing lights to more mundane-looking boxes. From seeing simple DASD with less capacity than the memory stick in this laptop be replaced with cache controllers and more sophisticated data storage devices. It always seemed that there were plenty of mainframes around and any normal person (me) was constantly being offered tours round installations. So it comes as a bit of a shock when a youngster clearly has no idea what a mainframe looks like or what it does!

OK, no-one may have actually said those words as such, but that was the message. Plus, I was with some friends on Saturday when the conversation turned to discussing what use a mainframe was in this day and age! As Arcati Director, Mark Lillycrop, so eloquently put it recently, mainframes are thought of as ‘your dad’s technology’. Most of the people I was chatting to felt that mainframes were relics of the past and anything they can do, a few servers could do just as well!

So for many of us mainframe verterans, our job is to get out there and spread the word. We need to tell people exactly what a mainframe is, what it can do, and how people are interacting with them all the time, but don’t realise it. That way, the new generation of youngsters that are beginning to get access to mainframe technology at universities and elsewhere will arrive with a knowledge of what mainframes can do, and why working with them can be so enjoyable.

So let’s just start with the absolute beginner’s guide to mainframes. They are computers – just like your laptop – except that over the years they faced and solved all the problems about back-ups and restores, security, and high-speed data access. They have been around for a long time – which is a good thing because lots of people have moved the technology forward. They allow millions of users controlled access to information – allowing them to create, modify, and save data from almost any data entry device you can think of, including browsers.

Mainframes have been virtualized since the 1980s, and some of the software first saw the light of day in the 1960s. Most Windows data centres have only been virtualizing for the past five years! It’s true that laptops etc are everywhere – in your home, at work, etc – but mainframes are working away in the background. Everytime you take money from an ATM (cash machine) your bank is running a transaction on a mainframe. And it is banks and large financial institutions that use mainframes. And they do it because of the reliability. They do it because, should there be an outage, they can recover back to almost the last second before they went down. Almost no transactions are lost. And as a bank customer, I like that. Lots of non-mainframe-using sites think they are doing quite well if they can recover data back to last night! You see the difference in scale here.

Mainframes run an operating system (z/OS, but could be z/VM or z/VSE) and on top of that are a number of subsystems – you might think of them as apps (but big ones!). These subsystems include CICS and IMS. Now, both of these have been being developed since the 1960s and provide ways of accessing data very quickly and securely. They allow users to fill in virtual forms. And they store data in a way that means it can be accessed very quickly.

Another ‘app’ you may have heard of is DB2. DB2 is a comparative youngster, having arrived in the 1980s. It stores data in a ‘relational’ way rather than the more traditional ‘hierarchical’ way. DB2 is a database that can exist on Windows machines as well as mainframes (and many devices in between).

Mainframes can also run Linux (z/Linux) and all the Linux applications. That makes them very cost-effective replacements for sites with numerous ageing Linux servers. Linux has been available on mainframes for just over 10 years.

And there’s plenty of software available to control all aspects of this mainframe behemoth. And you can link them together at different sites in different countries round the globe.

So if anyone asks you what’s a mainframe, you can tell them that it’s the most successful server architecture ever devised and it’s all around them doing important work.

CA provides May Mainframe Madness

Last week I was talking about the benefits of virtual user group like the Virtual IMS group (at www.fundi.com/virtualims) and the Virtual CICS group (at www.fundi.com/virtualcics). I was suggesting that attending this kind of group meant you didn’t need budgeting approval for time away from the office (meals, hotel rooms, travel, etc) and so made life easier for busy mainframe professionals. CA has taken this idea one step further – they’re devoting the whole May to mainframes, and doing it all virtually!

Details of CA’s May Mainframe Madness can be found at www.ca.com/content/page/May-Mainframe-Madness-2011.aspx.

CA describes it as the largest mainframe-focused event of its kind. They also say it’s the, “largest virtual Mainframe trade show in the world”. The information on the Web page currentlys says: “Every day brings new insights, tools and strategies to help you understand and maximize the strength and relevance of 21st century mainframe solutions. There are more than 100 valuable sessions over every business day in May, so you won’t want to miss a thing! Learn what’s new and find out how mainframe solutions from CA Technologies are leveraging Mainframe 2.0, CA’s innovative strategy to change the way the mainframe is managed forever.”

You can register now for the event at www.ca.com/mmm – which redirects to a registration page. CA claims that registration takes only 90 seconds, and go on to say: “The event will feature keynote presentations on everything from debugging to new backup and recovery techniques and 150+ virtual sessions and demos, as well as technical sessions, customer case studies, on-demand education materials, and various mainframe exhibits for approximately 7,500 professionals around the world.”

So why am I telling you about CA’s event in May? Don’t they have their own PR people who get paid to do it? Well, the reason I’m mentioning it is because I’ve been invited to take part, along with long-time friend, colleague, and iTech-Ed Associate, Mark Lillycrop, who’s CEO of Arcati Ltd – the people who produce the much-valued Arcati Mainframe Yearbook, which is freely available for download from www.arcati.com/newyearbook11. Mark and I will be available in what CA calls the Networking Lounge. This is a place where people can take part in scheduled chats as well as watch videos and have unscheduled chats with other attendees.

Other areas in CA’s virtual mainframe extravaganza are the Auditorium, the Job Role Resource Center, and the Exhibit Hall.

Mark and I haven’t finalized a time and date for this event, nor have we agreed on the topics we will be chatting about – but I’m sure it will be great fun and very informative. I’m also sure that I’ll let you have the exact details via this blog, Facebook, or Twitter in plenty of time. And I look forward to meeting you then and hearing your questions.

And if you’re looking for a virtual event to attend, then next Tuesday (12 April) at 10:30 CDT, Ron Haupert, a Senior Technologist with Rocket Software, will be talking to the Virtual IMS user group. The title of his presentation is: “Simplify and improve database administration by leveraging your storage system”. You can find out more about the event including how to register at www.fundi.com/virtualims.

New virtual CICS user group

How many times have you come away from a conference or a presentation and thought wow, that was really useful? Perhaps one small nugget of information from the speaker has opened a door for further development of work at your site. And most technical presentations are full of gems of information – both for the novice user and those more technically experienced.

But how often have you had to fight to justify attending meetings with other professionals? How often have you struggled to build a business case showing that a particular event or conference really will pay back more than it costs in your time off work, the cost of staff to cover your absence, travel costs, subsistence allowance, and hotel fees?

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to attend a highly professional technically-oriented seminar or presentation without having to leave your company’s offices – without, perhaps, even having to leave your desk?

And wouldn’t it be amazing if there was a single place where you could go and find out a little bit about the latest CICS product announcements, including a link to get more information if you wanted it? How cool would it be if there was a list of tools that ran on CICS with a brief summary of what each product did? And what about some way of finding out whenever someone published a new article about using CICS in IBM Systems Magazine or zJournal, or wherever – wouldn’t that be useful?

Well, the great news is that the all-new Virtual CICS user group at www.fundi.com/virtualcics provides all that and more. On the Web site you’ll find a list of useful applications that enhance CICS, and a list of CICS service providers. You’ll also find the latest product announcements and articles.

In addition, every other month (that’s six times a year) there will be a webinar. Using Citrix GoToMeeting, you’ll be able to stay at your desk and interact with other members of the user group and listen to the latest presentation by an acknowledged CICS expert. In the months when there isn’t a webinar, there will be a newsletter sent to all members keeping them up-to-date with the latest news.

And if you’re wondering how much this kind of high-quality service is likely to cost you, the answer is nothing – not a penny! Membership of the user group is free – you just need to sign up at www.fundi.com/virtualcics/register.htm. And the webinars are completely free to members. We’ll e-mail you a link about a fortnight before the webinar with all the information you need.

So, if you’re a CICS professional, this is the user group specifically tailored for you.

Why not join right now?

You may also be interested to know that the Virtual IMS user group has been running since November 2007. You can find out more about that at www.fundi.com/virtualIMS.

CICS tools

I've been putting together a list of CICS tools and I thought I'd share some of the information I'd found.
So far, I've found 110 products from 31 vendors - including ASG, ASPG, Attachmate, Axios Products, B.O.S. Software Service und Vertrieb GmbH, BMC Software, C\TREK Corp, CA, Circle Computer Group, Computer Application Services, Compuware, Cue, Metamon, Data21, Enterprise Research Inc, Foundation Software, GT Software, H&M Systems Software, H&W, Hostbridge Technology, IBM, Lee Technologies, MacKinney Systems, Macro 4, Matter of Fact Software, NETEC, International Inc, Rocket Software, Rosebud Management Systems, SDS, Serena Software, SOA Software, and UNICOM Systems.

The products allow users to do everything from development to sorting, from debugging to connectivity. The problem, I guess, from the CICS user's perspective is which product to choose. It's not like going to the supermarket and choosing between tins of beans from different vendors, it's more like making a choice between which menu item to choose at different restaurants. You assume that some are larger portions or come with better service. Some come with a side salad, at other restaurants all vegetables are separately priced.

The best I can do is create a list of products and briefly summarize what each product does - monitor, sort, management, tuning, etc. It's still very much down to the users to speak to each vendor and see what extras they get with their purchase and whether the product will integrate with the other third-party products already installed.

Below is a list of the CICS-related products that I've found so far. If you know of any others then please e-mail me at trevor@itech-ed.com and let me have the information. Or tell me if a company's gone out of business or a product doesn't really exist anymore, etc.

I am already aware of many products that work with CICS that aren't necessarily CICS-specific, so I haven't included them.

Abend-AID for CICS (Compuware), ASG-TMON for CICS TS for z/OS (ASG), Autoinstall (MacKinney Systems), AUTOMON/BATCH for z/OS (UNICOM Systems), AUTOMON/CICS for z/OS (UNICOM Systems), BOS-skip (B.O.S. Software Service und Vertrieb GmbH), BOS-pack (B.O.S. Software Service und Vertrieb GmbH), BOS-help (B.O.S. Software Service und Vertrieb GmbH), C\FLOW (Circle Computer Group), C\TREK (C\TREK Corp), CAFC (NETEC International Inc), CA CICSORT (CA), CA DADS Plus for CICS (CA), CA InterTest for CICS (CA), CA SOLVE:Operations Automation for CICS (CA), CA SymDump for CICS (CA), CA Verify for CICS (CA), CDDF (NETEC International Inc), CICS Application transformation tools (IBM), CICS Batch Application Control (IBM), CICS Business Event Publisher for MQSeries (IBM), CICS Configuration Manager for z/OS (CICS CM) (IBM), CICS Deployment Assistant for z/OS (IBM), CICS Interdependency Analyzer (IBM), CICS OTTO (Online Transmission Time Optimizer) (IBM), CICS Performance Monitor (IBM), CICS Performance Analyzer for z/OS (CICS PA) (IBM), CICS Subsystem Management tools (IBM), CICS Transaction Gateway (IBM), CICS Transaction Server for z/OS (IBM), CICS Universal Client (IBM), CICS VSAM Copy (IBM), CICS VSAM Recovery (IBM), CICS VSAM Transparency (IBM), CICS/CEMT from Batch (MacKinney Systems), CICS/Comet for z/OS (UNICOM Systems), CICS/Fax (MacKinney Systems), CICS/FCTD for z/OS (UNICOM Systems), CICS/FileServ for z/OS (UNICOM Systems), CICS/Forward Recovery System (MacKinney Systems), CICS/Hotprint (MacKinney Systems), CICS/Juggler for z/OS (UNICOM Systems), CICS/Log View (MacKinney Systems), CICS/Mapr II (MacKinney Systems), CICS/Menu II (MacKinney Systems), CICS/Message (MacKinney Systems), CICS/Morning News (MacKinney Systems), CICS/On Line File Utility (MacKinney Systems), CICS/Qeditor (MacKinney Systems), CICS/Qsort (MacKinney Systems), CICS/Response Time Monitor (MacKinney Systems), CICS/SignOn (MacKinney Systems), CICS/Spooler (MacKinney Systems), CICS/Spy (MacKinney Systems), CICS/Swap (MacKinney Systems), CICS/Timeout (MacKinney Systems), CICS/Windows for z/OS (UNICOM Systems), CICS-DupS (Enterprise Research Inc), CICS-Lock (Enterprise Research Inc), CICS-SSO (Enterprise Research Inc), CICS-View (Enterprise Research Inc), CICS2PDF (Computer Application Services, Inc), Command/CICS (ASPG - Advanced Software Products Group), Dump Detective for CICS (MacKinney Systems), Easy Help for CICS (MacKinney Systems), Eden Server (Rosebud Management Systems), Energizer for CICS (BMC Software), eSendIT (MacKinney Systems), Fault Analyzer (IBM), Help/Windows for z/OS (UNICOM Systems), Inter-Program Command Processor (IPCP PLUS) (SDS), IpServer (Data21), Ivory Service Architect (GT Software), KEYFAST (H&M Systems Software), MacKinney Batch to CICS (MBC) (MacKinney Systems), Macro Level Interpreter (MacKinney Systems), MAINVIEW AutoOPERATOR for CICS (BMC), MAINVIEW for CICS TS (BMC), Megapacker (H&M Systems Software), METAMON for CICS (Cue-Metamon) METAMON Power Tools (Cue-Metamon) MFAST/ES (H&M Systems Software), PEngiONL (CICS) (Foundation Software), PIE/CICS Availability Plus for z/OS (UNICOM Systems), PIE/CICS Dynamic Menus for z/OS (UNICOM Systems), PIE/CICS MultiCICS for z/OS) (UNICOM Systems), PIE/CICS NetGate for z/OS (UNICOM Systems), PIE/CICS NonStop CICS for z/OS (UNICOM Systems), PlexSpy Application Status Monitor (Matter of Fact Software), REPRO for CICS (Circle Computer Group) RMode31 (MacKinney Systems), Rocket FYI/CICS (Rocket Software), ROPES (Axios Products), Show and Tell II (MacKinney Systems), SoftQuery (H&M Systems Software), SOLA (SOA Software), StarTool DA (Dump Analyzer) (Serena Software), Strobe for CICS (Compuware), Synchro (Macro 4), SYSB-II (H&W), Tivoli OMEGAMON XE for CICS on z/OS (IBM), Tools4CICS (Data21), TraceMaster CodeTrack (Macro 4), Track (MacKinney Systems), UCCF/Server for z/OS (UNICOM Systems), Verastream Bridge Integrator (Attachmate), Vital Signs for CICS (Lee Technologies), WebTek (H&W) WIRE (Web Interface Rules Engine) (Hostbridge Technology), Xpediter/CICS (Compuware).