Develop applications under MVS or VM and run them under CICS

The SAS/C CICS Command Language Translator enables you to develop application programs under MVS or VM and target them to run under CICS. This application-programming interface enables you to request CICS services by placing CICS commands anywhere within your C or C++ source code. The SAS/C CICS translator translates these commands into appropriate function calls for communication with CICS. All CICS commands are supported, including Distributed Program Link (DPL) commands and Front End Programming Interface (FEPI) commands.

The following are some of the unique features offered by the SAS/C CICS run-time library:

• CICS/ESA Transaction Server 1.3 and all previous releases back to CICS/VS 1.7 are supported on MVS. In addition, CICS/VSE Version 2.3 and all previous releases back to CICS/VSE1.7 are supported on VSE systems.

• Support for the CICS Systems Programming Environment allows CICS systems programs to be written in C.

• All-resident support allows a module to be built containing all the transient library routines needed by the program.

• I/O support for JES spool files enables you to retrieve a file from the JES spool, write a file directly to the JES spool, and send a file to a remote destination using standard C library I/O functions.

• Dynamic loading support provides compatibility with MVS and CMS.

• For applications programs link-edited as AMODE 31, the C stack and heap can be allocated above the 16Mb line.

• Most of the SAS/C run-time library for CICS can reside above the 16Mb line.

The explosive growth of Internet client/server applications has resulted in significant enhancements to OS/390 to include an IBM HTTP Server, WebSphere for OS/390
http://www-4.ibm.com/software/webservers/appserv/os390.html

SAS/C application programmers may take advantage of services provided by the OS/390 Web Server to Web Enable existing applications or implement new applications. The CGI API is typically used as the interface between web clients and applications which present web pages. The compliance of SAS/C with the POSIX 1003.1 standard allows the porting of existing CGI programs to the OS/390 environment. To facilitate the implementation of CGI programs with SAS/C, developers may download a package which contains a sample CGI program. This package, sasc-cgi.tar also includes sample web pages, sample scripts to build a program and sample CGI ANSI C functions to parse, manipulate and generate HTML for web clients. The README file contained in the package lists the steps required to build the program.