Challanges while migrating CICS screens to Java (open source

himanshusoni77 · New User Joined: 19 Jul 2007 Posts: 6 Location: pune

Hi,

First of all apologies for an open ended question. We are currently migrating Legacy applications to open-source. We do have an inhouse tool which converts Cobol-CICS code to Java code but as this is a first time when we are actually going to migrate CICS (Transaction processing/Map processing) components, I want to know below things,

- Is there anyway to identify all the possible screen navigation in existing CICS screens? How can we document this if there is no automated way?

- What are possible challanges we might face while migrating? like I can see testing will be one huge task (with respect to screen navigations), alternate approach to VSAM in open source etc.

Thanks
H

Nic Clouston · Posted: Mon Oct 08, 2012 1:10 pm

And what has this to do with JCL? Do you not think that the CICS section of the forum would be a more appropriate place for a CICS question rather than the Job Control Language part?

dbzTHEdinosauer · Posted: Mon Oct 08, 2012 3:29 pm

do you want to migrate to java on the mainframe or
do you plan to migrate your business applications to a server?

doing a direct conversion from cics code to java code
is analogous to the clowns that went directly from vsam structure
to db2.
it makes no sense.

your conversion should be based on business requirements,
not mimicking the legacy process flow.

your business has defined input and expected results.
that should be your basis of determining if the conversion is correct.

mtaylor · Posted: Tue Oct 09, 2012 8:37 am

enrico-sorichetti · Posted: Tue Oct 09, 2012 12:34 pm

dick scherrer · Posted: Tue Oct 09, 2012 7:22 pm

Hello,

Not so very long ago one of my clients got the idea to re-write the presentation code in Java to get the Win-look-and-feel (for users who preferred their green-screen presentation). These were users who knew their systems well and did not want/need all of the "neat" clickables - they just wanted to do their work.

The management told a few Java people to convert the front-end (and at the time none had a mainframe logon ofher than ftp.

Fortunately, i dodged that bullet. Last i heard, they had decided to re-implement the system, not the front-end. Which could also be inbteresting as the system to be replaced is/was heavily integrated with other systems . . .

But who needs planning . . .

Akatsukami · Posted: Tue Oct 09, 2012 7:39 pm