CICS calling a web service

[cshih]

morning guys,

first of all, i am an application programmer and our system support has been outsourced to a data center and i am not getting any help from the data center. so i figure i should start asking questions myself.

we are an OS390 shop running CICS TS 1.3, we current have process that listen for a socket request coming in to a specific port, and which points to a specific CICS region, then execute a COBOL online program.

however, for this particular project we are needing make the COBOL online program to make an outbound call to a web service resides on our intranet.

would it be possible to make a outbound socket calls to the web service? all suggestion and recommendation is greatly appreciated!

 

[fredericofonseca]

you can do that with same versions of TS for sure. not quite sure of 1.3 as it is an oldish one.

http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/bookmgr_OS390/libraryserver/zosv1r9/

is a good source if you have time to go through the manuals.


Unfortunately I don't have access to a mainframe now, or I would be able to give some examples.
But i'm sure others here will be able to provide you with more info

Regards

Frederico Fonseca
SysSoft Integrated Ltd

http://www.syssoft-int.com

FAQ219-2884
FAQ181-2886

 

[MarcLodge]

cshih,
CICS TS 1.3 has certainly got web access and you can find details and examples in this manual here:

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg245480.pdf

At the site I am at we set up a couple of years ago a Cobol program that issued a call to a web server passing it some data, which then returned a chunk of XML which we parsed to get the info. We used the EXEC CICS WEB OPEN/CONVERSE/CLOSE commands which, once we went through a certain amount of teething problems, worked extremely well.

I'm not sure though if those commands are available in CICS TS 1.3. If you find out that they are, let me know and I can let you have an example.

Marc