Creating the web services infrastructure

To deploy a web service to CICS, you must create the necessary transport infrastructure and define one or more pipelines that will process your web services requests. Typically, one pipeline can process requests for many different web services, and, when you deploy a new web service in your CICS® system, you can choose to use an existing pipeline.

Subtopics

Configuring your CICS system for web services
Before you can use web services, your CICS system must be correctly configured.
The web services infrastructure
CICS applications in a CICS region can either provide a service to, or request a service from, applications that are external to that region by using a web services pipeline. When CICS is a service provider, the CICS application supplies a service to the external application. When CICS is a service requester, the external application supplies a service to the CICS application. Web services pipelines can be configured to use the IBM® zEnterprise® Application Assist Processor (zAAP) where available.
Creating the CICS infrastructure for a service provider
To create the CICS infrastructure for a service provider, you must create a pipeline configuration file and create a number of CICS resources.
Creating the CICS infrastructure for a service requester
To create the CICS infrastructure for a service requester, you must create a pipeline configuration file and create a number of CICS resources.
Pipeline configuration files
The configuration of a pipeline used to handle a web service request is specified in an XML document, known as a pipeline configuration file.
Application handlers
An application handler is a CICS program that the terminal handler of a SOAP service provider pipeline links to at run time.
Message handlers
A message handler is a CICS program that is used to process a web service request during input and to process the response during output. Message handlers use channels and containers to interact with one another and with the system.
The SOAP message handlers
The SOAP message handlers are CICS-provided message handlers that you can include in your pipeline to process SOAP 1.1 and SOAP 1.2 messages. You can use the SOAP message handlers in a service requester or in a service provider pipeline.
Containers used in the pipeline
A pipeline typically consists of a number of message handler programs and, when the CICS-supplied SOAP message handlers are used, a number of header processing programs. CICS uses containers to pass information to and from these programs. The programs also use containers to communicate with other programs in the pipeline.
Runtime processing for web services
To send a request to a web service provider or to receive a request from a web service requester, your application (or wrapper program) must interact correctly with the web services support in CICS. You can also control the processing that takes place in the pipeline to determine how the inbound and outbound requests are handled.
Support for Web Services transactions
The Web Services Atomic Transaction (or WS-AtomicTransaction) specification and the Web Services Coordination (or WS-Coordination) specification define protocols for short term transactions that enable transaction processing systems to interoperate in a web services environment. Transactions that use WS-AtomicTransaction have the ACID properties of atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability.
Support for MTOM/XOP optimization of binary data
In standard SOAP messages, binary objects are base64-encoded and included in the message body, which increases their size by 33%. For very large binary objects, this size increase can significantly impact transmission time. Implementing MTOM/XOP provides a solution to this problem.
Support for Web Services Addressing
CICS supports services that use the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Services Addressing (WS-Addressing) specifications. This family of specifications provides transport-independent mechanisms to address web services and facilitate end-to-end addressing.

dfhws_create_pipeline.html | Timestamp icon

Last updated: Thursday, 27 June 2019