CICS and Enterprise JavaBeans

IBM is supporting Enterprise JavaBeans™ (EJB) across its application server products. Together with related Java™ technologies, EJB provides a standard programming model and set of services across major server platforms. This paper presents an overview of the EJB architecture and describes the technical strategy and design approach for the EJB capability that is being delivered in the latest release of the Customer Information Control System (CICS®). It explores why CICS customers want to use enterprise Java technology, identifies some critical success factors for the CICS support of EJB, and explains its architecture in terms of a portable EJB container executing within the existing CICS run-time infrastructure, focusing on aspects such as transaction management, Java virtual machine reuse, and workload management. Application development tooling is then discussed, together with the strategy for exploiting tools such as VisualAge® for Java. Finally, the paper considers future work and challenges for CICS in this area.