CICS® provides
support for applications that conform to the Service Component Architecture
(SCA) specifications. SCA supports rapid deployment of new applications to
meet changing business requirements by promoting the reuse of existing application
assets in a component model.
In SCA, applications are composed of services, where each service is described
by using one or more components. These components are assembled together into
a composite application that can participate in a service-oriented architecture
(SOA) as part of a business service. A business service is a service that
is aligned with business processes and models rather than a technical implementation.
The SCA component model is flexible, so you can reuse the same components
in different composite applications without needing to change the underlying
business logic.
To create a composite application, use the SCA tools in Rational® Developer
for System z®. The SCA tools deploy composite applications to CICS as bundles and can be enabled and
disabled by using the BUNDLE resource.
You can create two types of service from your CICS applications:
- Channel-based services
- These services use the Service Component Architecture (SCA) support to
describe applications as components. The interface for these services is a
channel. Channel-based services can be called only by other CICS applications
by using the INVOKE SERVICE API command.
- XML-based services
- These services are typically Web service provider or requester applications
that use XML to interface with other applications and use a binding to transform
the data. Web service applications can also be described as components that
use SCA. The interface for these services is XML with a binding to transform
the data. XML-based services can be called by other CICS applications by using the INVOKE SERVICE
API command or by an external client.