CICS and Rexx

Anyone doing anything with Rexx and CICS? I may start a POC to see what I can do using Rexx. I'll let you know what I find....

Should production transactions abend?

I know of a company that will NOT fix transactions that abend in production. NO time, it doesn't happen all the time... are some of the responses Tech Support gets from the developers. An EMAIL address was set up so the development support staff could be given notice when abends happen. No one has been asked to be put into that mailing list.
I would disable the transaction(s) until someone agrees to work on them. even if that meant some loss of work.

How does anyone else feel?

Threadsafe

Currently, there is a plan to move to Threadsafe CICS programs, just as long as they don't have to be changed. Apparently the application development managers don't understand the concept of programs being Threadsafe or they wouldn't have made the proclamation "We are going to Threadsafe programs for CICS" to better utilize the computer. This group of people need to STOP reading magazines and start listening to their people that know. There should have been meetings, long before I started here, explaining what Threadsafe is, what it gains, and the process for getting there. These costs should have been noted, and a plan for this developed and formalized.
Maybe in the next life .....

The CICS Web program from ...

I was asked to review a CICS Web program for efficiency. There was a development effort underway that was going to change the size of the input and the number of different options this program was going to have to work on.
The first thing I noticed was the program looked through the entire input stream for a XML tag that would identify which function this data was connected to. This tag would have been in the first 30 - 50 characters. This would have been OK if the input stream was small, however this input stream was going to become very large, 2MB - 4MB. The developers also wanted to move this input stream to Working-Storage. They are adding new tags. Hopefully the new user was the first tag, at least his transactions would be a bit quicker. Once the tag was found, the appropriate code was performed, if that tag wasn't found, then on to the next tag. Scanning through 3 MB of XML data 4 or 5 times before finding the tag you want AND you want sub-second response time... !!!! I don't think a CRAY Super Computer could do that!
The program also performed a paragraph to upper case a record, but did it as many times as the record was long.
The program also didn't believe CICS for the length of the input stream and did some really strange checking for what was at the end of the stream to determine the length. I can't believe that CICS didn't return the correct length.
My look through this program was an eye-opener !
My recommendations were ignored and the program was cloned after the changes were made and now there are 3 or 4 of these trying to work.
These programs and my recommendations have resurfaced a few times in the last 3 years and some of my changes have been made, but not all of them. They would be out of the scope of the then current project and it appears to be working, so we aren't going to change it now .... So when??

CICS Web Client

I once had an opportunity to write a CICS web client. This was an application that was called as a subroutine, being passed a commarea. It would construct a outgoing XML message, then call a POSTing program to send the message. When the response message was received, the XML would be parsed back into the commarea. The application also included a program to sign on to the server on the other end. Very fun project.

This site...

This site is about CICS. If you know what it is, then you’re at the right place. If you don’t know, welcome anyway, but to learn what it is, here.

I started this site to share some of my 20+ years of installing, configuring, tuning and programming CICS starting with CICS 1.6.1 in 1984. The current version I’m familiar with is Transaction Server 3.1, but since I'm currently working as a DB2 DBA, I'm not currently supporting CICS, but I still get called upon because of my experience.

This site won’t try to teach you all about CICS, you’ll have to go elsewhere for that. What I’ll try to do is share some of my projects/programs/code segments/etc that may help you.

There may also be a Rexx or two thrown in for good measure.

What this Blog is all about

I hope this blog will be about CICS, if I don't get too side-tracked. I have some code snippets, ideas for all sorts of programs/projects, opinions, etc to share.

It's Begun...

Well I've started a Blog on Blogger... This should be fun.