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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