Explained: z/OS Connect

A mobile banking app developer needs to display a customer's account summary. The data lives in a CICS COBOL program that has run the bank's core logic for thirty years. The developer knows REST and JSON. She has never heard of CICS, has no idea what a commarea is, and has no intention of learning. She needs an endpoint she can call with a standard HTTP GET request and get back JSON. The CICS web services approach covered in the previous … Read More

Explained: OAuth 2.0 Token Exchange

You're building a feature. A user calls your API, your API authenticates them, and then your service needs to call three downstream services to assemble the response. One of those services keeps an audit log — it records which user triggered each operation. So your team wires it up: when your API calls downstream, it forwards the user's token. Simple enough. Except the downstream service starts rejecting requests. The token your API hold… Read More