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Due to processing by IBM, this request was reassigned to have the following updated attributes:
Brand - Servers and Systems Software
Product family - Transaction Processing
Product - CICS Transaction Server
For recording keeping, the previous attributes were:
Brand - WebSphere
Product family - Transaction Processing
Product - CICS Transaction Server
The CICS TS Feature Pack for Modern Batch interacts with the scheduler in WebSphere Application Server (WAS) to accept, process and report on the status of jobs. This WAS scheduler has a message driven bean (MDB) interface and IBM supplies a program to integrate it with enterprise schedulers, such as BMC Control-M. This should enable JCL jobs and the dependencies between them to remain in Control-M, and for Control-M to start xJCL jobs in the WAS scheduler. Within an xJCL job, the job steps can be predicated on the condition codes of previous job steps.
There are a number of considerations when porting existing batch applications to run with the Feature Pack, as outlined in topic http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/cicsts/v5r1/topic/com.ibm.cics.ts.modernbatch.doc/tasks/porting.html. In particular the batch application is required to implement the Java-based batch programming model that is significantly different to how existing batch programs written in COBOL/C/C++/Assembler are started and process their data. For example existing batch applications will likely assume exclusive access to resources that is not appropriate when operating in shared data environment such as CICS TS, where records need to be locked for update and released at frequent intervals (syncpoint) with integrity. It may be possible for some COBOL/C/C++/Assembler business logic to be reused if it can be compiled into a CICS program that the new batch application can link to using the JCICS api.
Rational Application Developer does provide tooling to create new xJCL and Java batch applications - see http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/tutorials/1203_usha/section2.html . However there are no plans to create a tool that automates the transformation.