Siebel CICS Connector

Organizations worldwide have decades of business processes and data in legacy applications running under CICS. Dealing with those legacy applications is the single largest headache when they design integration frameworks. HostBridge provides a lowrisk, high-value solution that preserves investments in CICS applications and lowers integration costs.

HostBridge is mainframe software that allows you to integrate CICS transactions and data with Siebel® using SmartScripts to call a HostBridge service and process the response data. Our 'starter kit' provides sample SmartScripts that illustrate how companies interact with HostBridge in production environments. This allows you to quickly access your existing CICS business systems and integrate them into Siebel business processes. HostBridge supports a wide variety of connectivity options.

Read more in the Siebel CICS Connector Overview from HostBridge Technologies

July 2009 marks the 40th birthday of CICS®, and there’s every reason to be confident that CICS will be around for a long time to come. The largest enterprises in the world bet their business daily on the robust, reliable transaction processing of CICS, which handles more than 30 billion transactions per day at a value of more than $1 trillion per week. And increasingly, organizations are extracting greater value from trusted CICS applications and data thanks to services-based integration. Of course CICS integration hasn’t been a cakewalk, yet today there’s great reason to celebrate. Although legacy CICS applications have posed any number of challenges on the road to services-based integration, we’ve come a very long way, and CICS can now legitimately claim as a full-fledged participant in services architectures of every shape and size.

Over the past decade, HostBridgeTM has had a significant role in enabling Webservices integration for CICS. And our passion for high-fidelity CICS integration has reaped rewards for customers in every major business sector. So to honor CICS and because we hope the story has relevance and value for you, we offer this brief history of how HostBridge and IBM make high-fidelity CICS integration real.

Read more in the High-Fidelity CICS® Integration white paper from HostBridge Technologies

In 2007, Gartner predicted that Web oriented architectures defined by REST and XML over HTTP would replace 90% of Web SOAP-only implementations by 2011. You can see the move away from SOAP to RESTful architectures in Google APIs, Salesforce.com, and within large organizations like Wal-Mart. SOAP and REST will continue to play roles, but what will those roles be and when should you choose one over the other?

Read more in the whitepaper "Choosing formal and informal Web services for CICS integration" from HostBridge Technologies

Ensuring Calender Compliance - an essential part of the testing cycle

The criticality of dates

A large number of mission-critical applications contain date or time sensitive processing logic that can be misinterpreted or deemed difficult to test, for example for:

• the first or last day of the month
• the first or last business day of the weekend of quarter or financial year
• public holidays such as Christmas
• the clock rollover at midnight, and so on

Ensuring compliance

In a quality-conscious environment an essential part of the final testing of any changes to such applications should be to test them with date conditions to which they may be sensitive to obtain Calender Compliance. Ideally, a set of test scripts, which exercise the application for significant dates, could be run as a standard step in the final stages of the testing cycle, as shown in the following illustration of a possible development cycle.

Read more in the Ensuring Calender Compliance document from DDV technologies.