Dynamic Scripting Now Supported in CICS/TS 4.2

IBM had stated in the CICS/TS 4.2 Announcement Letter that it intended to provide support for dynamic scripting in 4.2, and now it has come through on this promise. Feature Pack for Dynamic Scripting 1.1 is now available for those running CICS/TS 4.2.

Dynamic Scripting, introduced as an unsupported SupportPac in CICS/TS 3.2, and supported in CICS/TS 4.1 as a Feature Pack, opens up CICS for the 4 million plus PHP and Groovy developers, and provides mainframe CICS shops with an environment that can be used to quickly develop prototypes and/or build productivity applications such as dashboards or widgets, most often associated with Intel or UNIX servers.

The availability of a version of the Feature Pack for CICS/TS 4.2 is welcome news for those of us curious about the 4.1 Feature Pack, but hesitant to invest time in it until it was supported in CICS/TS 4.2. Now that dynamic scripting has been supported in consecutive CICS/TS releases, it must be taken seriously as a viable option for PHP development!

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CICS-L Listserv

A great source of CICS information and help is the CICS-L Listserv. As of this post, there are over 1800 members, but only a handful of regular contributors. Still, it is a good resource for when you get stuck, and its archive is a great source of info. Since you are reading my blog, I highly recommend that you check out the CICS-L archives and consider subscribing.

Handy Listserv Commands Below is a list of listserv commands you may find handy should you subscribe. All of these commands are issued by sending an email from the email address that is or that you wish to be subscribed to the CICS-L listserv. Subscribe: Send a message to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU, with the following in the text (not the subject): SUBSCRIBE CICS-L Temporarily Leave: If, for example, you are going on vacation, send a message to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU, with the following in the text (not the subject): SET CICS-L NOMAIL Rejoin: When you are back from your vacation, send a message to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU, with the following in the text (not the subject): SET CICS-L MAIL Leave Permanently: Send a message to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU, with the following in the text (not the subject): SIGNOFF CICS-L For More Information: Send a message to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU, with the following in the text (not the subject): HELP or INFO … HELP will have a short help message sent to you, where INFO will have a list of documents that you can order with more extensive help sent to you.

A few notes on listserv etiquette:

• Do your homework before asking for help. Be sure you RTFM (read the fine manuals); you don’t want to ask a question and take up others’ time on something that you can look up yourself.
• Be sure to include a descriptive subject line. E-mails received with no subject line may likely be perceived as spam by an email filter and be deleted before reaching the recipient’s inbox, and those with a concise subject are more likely to be read and/or answered.
• Don’t just automatically hit “reply”; that will send your response to the entire list. If your response is only of interest to the person who wrote the message you are replying to, then cut their email address and send your message just to them.
• Never use CICS-L to market a product. Posting independent reviews or help tips on CICS-related products is usually OK, but marketing is not acceptable.
• Temporarily leave CICS-L when going on vacation. Please be aware that if you use an auto-responder while on vacation without setting your subscription options to NOMAIL, your “out of office” messages will be broadcast to everyone on the list. Most of them do not care and do not wish to receive such messages from other listserv members.

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Dynamic Scripting and CICS/TS 4.2

Are you using the new Dynamic Scripting Feature Pack? If so, you must be running CICS/TS 4.1 … There was only a limited SupportPac for CICS/TS V3, and IBM just announced that the Dynamic Scripting Featue Pack is not supported on CICS/TS 4.2.

CICS/TS 4.2 supports only 64-bit JVM’s, and the feature pack has environment variables set for using 31-bit JVM’s. We will be watching for an update from IBM soon, as supporting dynamic scripting was listed on the CICS/TS 4.2 Announcment Letter‘s Statement of Direction.

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