Applications that are business services can participate in a service-oriented
architecture (SOA). A business service is a service that is aligned
with business processes and models rather than a technical implementation.
You can expose existing and new CICS® applications as part of a business
service using the support provided in CICS.
You can create two types of service from your CICS applications:
- Channel-based services
- These services use the Service Component Architecture (SCA) support to
expose applications as service components. The interface for these services
is a channel. Channel-based services can be called only by other CICS applications
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. You can also describe Web service applications as components using
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 using the INVOKE
SERVICE API command or by an external client.
- An XML-based service can also be an application that uses the TRANSFORM API
commands to map application data to and from XML. The XML assistant uses a
language structure or XML schema to generate the XML binding and also create
a bundle.
Both types of service use the pipeline support in CICS.