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.