Developing applications using the CICS Explorer SDK
The CICS Explorer® Software Development Kit (SDK) provides an environment for developing and deploying Java™ applications to CICS®, including support for OSGi and web projects. If you want to develop Java applications without using the SDK, see Developing applications using other tools.
About this task
You can use the SDK to create new applications, or repackage existing Java applications to comply with the OSGi specification. The OSGi Service Platform provides a mechanism for developing applications using a component model and deploying those applications to a framework as OSGi bundles. An OSGi bundle is the unit of deployment for an application and contains version control information, dependencies, and application code. The main benefit of OSGi is that you can create applications from reusable components that are accessed only through well-defined interfaces called Java packages. You can then use OSGi services to access the Java packages. You can also manage the lifecycle and dependencies of Java applications in a granular way. For information about developing applications with OSGi, see the OSGi Alliance website.
You can also use the SDK to work with dynamic web projects and OSGi application projects that include Java servlets and JSP pages. You can create an application that has a modern web layer and business logic that uses JCICS to access CICS services. If your web application needs to access code from another OSGi bundle, it must be deployed as an OSGi Application Project (EBA file). You must either include the other OSGi bundle in the application manifest, or install the other bundle in the Liberty bundle_repository as a common library. The EBA file must include a web-enabled OSGi bundle (WAB file) to provide the entry point to the application and to expose it as a URL to a web browser.
You can use the SDK to develop a Java application to run in any supported release of CICS. Different releases of CICS support different versions of Java, and the JCICS API has also been extended in later releases to support more features of CICS. To avoid using the wrong classes, the SDK provides a feature to set up a target platform. You can define which release of CICS you are developing for, and the SDK automatically hides the Java classes that you cannot use.
The SDK help provides full details on how you can perform each of the following steps to develop and deploy applications.