Suppose you need to go to the store to pick up a dozen items. Most of us would make one trip, grab all 12 items, and return home. Imagine then, the inefficiency of making 12 separate trips to the store to pick up your items one at a time! It’s absurd to think that anyone would do that. Who has that much time? And yet, this scenario is a good metaphor for how many organizations are accomplishing CICS integration. Orchestrating CICS transactions using JavaScript is a far more efficient way to do this. To understand why, let’s first consider how many organizations are building CICS integrations.
One-to-One Mapping
A fair number of CICS integrations are built using middle-tier integration solutions. These integrations often have a one-to-one relationship between a request coming in to CICS, and the transactions that are run as a result. This scenario mimics the “going to the store a dozen times” metaphor described above. It works, and gets the job done, but very inefficiently.
Why not do some orchestration in the middle-tier? It’s possible, and a lot of organizations that use middle-tier integration solutions do this. It creates some efficiencies. To illustrate with our metaphor, doing this is like driving to the store, and going in to buy one item at a time. Each time, you return to your car in the parking lot with your item, then go back in to buy the next item. There are some benefits to orchestrating in the middle-tier, but as we have shared previously on this blog, it doesn’t deliver all the efficiency that is possible.
Orchestrating CICS Transactions on the Mainframe
The most efficiency – which translates into reduced latency and mainframe consumption – occurs when orchestrating CICS transactions on the host using JavaScript. In our metaphor, this is making one trip to the store to buy all dozen items on your list. We just wrote about helping a client do this very thing. Using the HostBridge JavaScript Engine (HB.js), it took us less than a day to develop a web service that executes five different transactions and goes through 42 CICS screens.
We’ve created a 3-minute video that shares a visualization of this scripted sequence using Splunk:
Do you need your CICS applications to fully participate in a Hybrid IT strategy? Or perhaps you simply need to integrate them with web, cloud, or mobile applications. Using JavaScript to integrate and orchestrate your CICS applications provides significant benefits. It’s easy to find out via a free, supported HostBridge pilot. To learn more, reach out to use by using the contact information found at the bottom of this page.