How CICS supports Web services

CICS® supports two different approaches to deploying your CICS applications in a Web services environment. One approach enables rapid deployment, with the least amount of programming effort; the other approach gives you complete flexibility and control over your Web service applications, using code that you write to suit your particular needs. Both approaches are underpinned by an infrastructure consisting of one or more pipelines and message handler programs which operate on Web service requests and responses.

When you deploy your CICS applications in a Web services environment: Whichever approach you follow, you can use your own message handlers to perform additional processing on your request and response messages, or use CICS-supplied message handlers which are designed especially to help you process SOAP messages.