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

Architecture: CICS Web Services

A mortgage application arrives from a bank's customer portal. The portal is a modern React application running on a cloud server. The actual mortgage logic, the eligibility rules, the rate tables, the credit assessment, lives in a COBOL program in a CICS region that has been running, battle-tested, for twenty years. The two systems need to talk. Rewriting the COBOL program is not on the table. Rewriting the portal to speak CICS protocols is n… Read More

Explained: MQ on z/OS

A customer submits a mortgage application on a bank's website. The web server accepts it immediately and shows a confirmation. Behind the scenes, that application needs to pass through a fraud check, a credit bureau lookup, an underwriting system, and a document management platform. Each of those systems runs on different infrastructure, at different speeds, and is maintained by different teams. The web server cannot wait for all of them. It… Read More