I am fortunate once again to be attending IBM Impact. The general session again focused on mobile, and featured speakers from Tangerine Bank, Square, and Daimler Car2Go. Live demos did not go too well due to apparent networking issues, but speakers covered nicely.
Here are some of my biggest take-aways from today’s CICS sessions:
- The 5.2 Developer Trial can be turned into a full version without re-installing.
- The mobile feature pack introduced in 5.1 is integrated into the base in 5.2.
- “Simple” Occurs Depending On is supported in 5.2 web services.
- 5.2 has something called Multi-Versioning, which allows a new version of a program to be implemented, and taken out, quickly. It is possible to have the new version and old version available simultaneously.
- Of course, as with every new release of CICS in recent years, more things are moving above the bar for virtual storage relief, and more commands are threadsafe.
- It was not explicitly stated, but all indications are that the CICSPlex WUI is going away after V5. It is time to really start using the CICS Explorer, if you’re not already using it.
I had a great one-on-one “Lunch and Learn” session on the CICS Explorer. It was originally slated for myself and one other person, but they were a no-show. The session was a good review of many of the things I already knew, and I picked up a couple of new tidbits. The one-on-one and Lunch and Learn sessions alone pretty much make the trip for Impact worthwhile.
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Steve Baugh - The CICS Guy 
Hi Steve… great post, but we’ve not got any current plans to stop folks using the browser interface via the WUI – and the WUI server is a foundation component that enables the CICS Explorer, so it’s not going away either. If you want to hear me talk more about this then come to my ‘Managing Large Scale CICS Environments’ session tomorrow afternoon.
cheers,
Ian Mitchell – AIMz CTO
Thanks for the correction, Ian. I understand that the CICS Explorer uses a WUI server to interface to the CICSPlex, but I sure came away from one of the sessions (Steve Zemblowski’s V5 Technical Overview, I believe) with the understanding that V5 would the last that supported the browser interface to the WUI. I did not type what I had meant; the WUI itself was not being sunset (still being needed for CICS Explorer), but I thought I heard that the browser interface to it was. I obviously misunderstood. I appreciate your update, and I stand corrected.
Steve