Deploying osgi bundles to cics

Question

I've created several Java applications for CICS and used CICS Explorer and deployed them to CICS TS 4.2. Everything I've read says to deploy in this manner, but what if I want to create an application to deploy to a 3rd party environment? According to everything from IBM I need to use CICS Explorer. I've actually been able to avoid CICS explorer with a nasty hack that involves creating the bundle on Z/OS, downloading the bundle, editing the cics.xml file and redeploying elsewhere. Works but the whole process leaves something to be desired.

Is there a documented alternative to using CICS Explorer to deploy CICS Java apps? I did read something about the ability to deploy osgi bundles that are not cics bundles but I've not been able to find any more information on this.

Answer 1

Thanks for you question. Before I can answer I have a couple of my own if you don't mind. Firstly when you say you want to deploy an application to “a 3rd party environment” what do you mean; is this a different CICS system or something else? Secondly what issues do you have with using CICS Explorer to create and deploy the application?

Answer 2

Time passes and, from 2019, there's another solution to this question.

If you build your Java using Maven or Gradle, you can use the CICS bundle Maven plugin or CICS bundle Gradle plugin. They take your Java module and wrap it up into a CICS bundle ready for you to deploy to either CICS or an artifact repository.

The plugins work for any release of CICS TS, but if you also have CICS TS 5.6 and above then you can use the CICS bundle deployment API directly from those plugins to also deploy to CICS as part of your development build.

Answer 3

You can maybe use the CICS build toolkit, this allows you to create/build a deployable CICS bundle project structure from an Eclipse project. It also allows you to modify specific variables in CICS bundle resource attributes using values in a properties file, this includes the JVM server name.