Beginning with IBM® CICS® Version 2, applications can run on TCBs apart from the QR TCB, which has positive implications for improving system throughput and for implementing new technologies inside of CICS. Examples of implementing new technologies include using the IBM MVS™ Java virtual machine (JVM) inside CICS and enabling listener tasks written for other platforms to be imported to run under CICS.

The newest release, CICS Transaction Server for z/OS® (CICS TS) V4.2, includes scalability enhancements so that you can perform more work more quickly in a single CICS system. The advantage of this enhancement is that you can increase vertical scaling and decrease the need to scale horizontally, reducing the number of regions that are required to run the production business applications. The scalability enhancements in CICS TS V4.2 fall into two broad areas, which are increased usage of open transaction environment (OTE) and of 64-bit storage.

This IBM Redbooks® publication is a comprehensive guide to threadsafe concepts and implementation for IBM CICS. This book explains how systems programmers, applications developers, and architects can implement threadsafe applications in an environment. It describes the real-world experiences of users, and our own experiences, of migrating applications to be threadsafe. This book also highlights the two most critical aspects of threadsafe applications: system performance and integrity.

Part 1. Threadsafe concepts and definitions

Chapter 1. Introduction to CICS open transaction environment

Chapter 2. Overview of an open transaction environment and threadsafe applications

Chapter 3. Threadsafe techniques

Part 2. Threadsafe implementation

Chapter 4. Threadsafe tasks

Chapter 5. Application review

Chapter 6. System programmer tasks

Chapter 7. Threadsafe conversion considerations

Chapter 8. Migration scenario

Chapter 9. Threadsafe enablement using CICS Tools

Part 3. Performance and general questions

Chapter 10. Performance case studies

Chapter 11. Common threadsafe questions

Part 4. Appendixes and related publications

Appendix A. Overview of CICS Tools

Appendix B. Maintenance of CICS, DB2, and WebSphere MQ

Appendix C. Assembler routines