The Blue Grizzly stares in the glass at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver where SHARE is meeting this week. The hungry bruin eyeing the enterprise attendees seems an adequate metaphor for business conditions in the mainframe world in the current global economic crisis.

I'll be blogging 'til Wednesday as I pop in and out of SHARE.

CICS is celebrating its 40 anniversary this year. CICS is conceptually what nowadays we call a transaction processing application server. It runs under z/OS and z/VSE. It provides container-based services for security, task management and data access, providing a runtime environment that manages the applications that run inside. CICS inately supports two-phase commit.

Relevance to those of us who live in EJB and web applications? CICS directly supports HTTP. IBM implemented direct EJB back in 2000-2004 but that support is being deprecated, since the new implementation of the J2EE connector architecture supersedes the EJB runtime previously shipped with CICS by IBM. CICS also supports the open Web Services Standard.

Bottom line: CICS provides layered and relatively seamless face to J2EE or .NET presentation of enterprise data, much of which has been collecting in mainframe databases lo, these past 50 years.