Mobile Mainframe – Check It Out!

I just received a very nice email from IBM’er Andy Armstrong, letting me know about his new blog, Mobile Mainframe. I see that he has posted that he had seen that I mentioned him and his IBM Impact session in one of my recent posts.

Andy’s session at IBM Impact 2013 was a great introduction to having a CICS back end to a mobile application, using JSON. With CICS TS 5.1, all the tools are there. Andy even had the courage to do a live demo … We all know from Bill Gates’ infamous blue screen of death demo years back how dangerous that can be! But no glitches for Andy – his sample insurance claim demo went smooth.

Check out Andy’s blog and bookmark it – I have already done so. I am sure you will find interesting reading there.

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IBM Impact 2013 Day Two

My day two at IBM Impact 2013 was filled with more information about some of the new and upcoming enhancements to CICS/TS in V5.1. Andy Armstrong’s session on JSON in CICS (which is basically web services dealing with data in JSON format instead of XML) was excellent, as were Fraser Bohm’s sessions on Modern Batch and Liberty containers. The WAS Liberty profile is key behind a lot of the cool new capabilities in CICS; I would like to have seen even more on that – perhaps a “for dummies” session and one with more details and/or examples. We are fortunate to have the Hursely folks here in Vegas to share their insight on some of the latest developments in CICS.

The conference is just half over – still lots to see and learn!

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IBM Impact 2013 Day One

I saw a lot of good CICS sesssions right out of the gate at the IBM Impact 2013 conference. Version 5.1 has an amazing number of new features, including a couple of new and upcoming feature packs, and many enhancements to existing features.

New features include a cloud-like way to define and manage resources, autonomic policy-based management, a new version of CICS Explorer coming out in June, and a new product called CICS TS Value Unit Edition. New feature packs include Modern Batch and Mobile /JSON support. A statement of direction was given indicating upcoming feature packs for Security Tokens and V5 support of Dynamic Scripting. The new Dynamic Scripting feature pack will be built upon Liberty instead of Zero; one at least hopes this will give it a fast track into inclusion into the base product.

More than a few significant enhancements have been made in version 5.1. There is 24-bit and 31-bit storage relief, as much of the CICS system storage has been moved above the bar. As always with new releases and versions, more commands have been made thread safe. CEMT SET, PERFORM, ENABLE, and DISABLE commands are now audited – no more wondering who issued a newcopy command right before response time tanked!

Still much to learn in the remaining days of Impact 2013, but the preview on Monday certainly wets the appetite.

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