20 Facts About CICS

1.

CICS manages the entire transaction such that if for any reason a part of the transaction fails all recoverable changes can be backed out.

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2.

CICS was preceded by an earlier, single-threaded transaction processing system, IBM MTCS.

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3.

An 'MTCS-CICS bridge' was later developed to allow these transactions to execute under CICS with no change to the original application programs.

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4.

CICS was originally developed in the United States at an IBM Development Center in Des Plaines, Illinois, beginning in 1966 to address requirements from the public utility industry.

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5.

The first CICS product was announced in 1968, named Public Utility Customer Information Control System, or PU-CICS.

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6.

CICS owes its early popularity to its relatively efficient implementation when hardware 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.

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7.

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.

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8.

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.

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9.

Many of the newer web facing technologies were made available for earlier releases of CICS using delivery models other than a traditional product release.

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10.

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.

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11.

Program corruption and CICS control block corruption was a frequent cause of system downtime.

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12.

When CICS was first released, it only supported application transaction programs written in IBM 360 Assembler.

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13.

CICS allows the programmer to access and manipulate these by passing the address of the list as the first argument to the program.

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14.

Command-level-only CICS introduced in the early 1990s offered some advantages over earlier versions of CICS.

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15.

Plug-ins for Maven and Gradle are provided to simplify automated building of CICS bundles, using familiar IDEs like Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA, and Visual Studio Code.

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16.

CICS provides the same run-time container as IBM's WebSphere product family so Java EE applications are portable between CICS and Websphere and there is common tooling for the development and deployment of Java EE applications.

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17.

CICS transaction is a set of operations that perform a task together.

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18.

CICS screens are usually sent as a construct called a map, a module created with Basic Mapping Support assembler macros or third-party tools.

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19.

Under CICS, following are some of the resources which are considered recoverable.

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20.

Original CICS nucleus consisted of a number of functional modules written in 370 assembler until V3:.

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