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.