Introduction
This article shows you how easy it is to take a CICS application and run it on Pivotal's Cloud Foundry.
Pre-Requisites
You have registered for a Pivotal Web Services account and followed the initial 15 minute tutorial on how to create a simple application that runs on pivotal. You can register and follow the tutorial here https://pivotal.io/platform/pcf-tutorials/getting-started-with-pivotal-cloud-foundry/introduction
CICS Application
I selected the mortgage amortization sample CICS applications that we deliver with Elastic COBOL. So I needed to create the initial application and source code.
So in Eclipse I selected "File...New...Cobol Project"
I then named it "mort" and selected "sample...ETP Mortgage Amortization"
Now unfortunately the sample default is to be exported as an ear file. This means that expects the target environment to be a full JEE Application server. Whilst we can configure and run custom pivotal cloud foundry buildpacks for this, it is much simpler to just deliver a .war file to PCF and enable it to run under the default application server which for PCF is tomcat. So with our target environment being a standard application server we need to manually include a JEE library javaee-api-7.0.jar on the buid path of the mort application.
I have attached this file, download it and add it to the eclipse mort project build path.
We are now ready to create the deployment war file and for this we need and Elastic Transaction Deployment Project
In Eclipse "File...New...ETP Project"
Click "Finish".
We now need to configure the deployment project with some information about the project to be deployed
Double click on the project.etp_deploy_settings and then in General Category set the sysid and particpating projects
Click "Apply"
Now ensure that the programs are listed under Category...Programs
Now add the mapping of transactions to programs under the Category...Transactions
Click "Apply" to ensure these settings are saved.
We now need to create the deployment war file and we do this by right clicking on the mort_deploy project in Eclipse and selecting Export
then we select the ETP Deployment wizard
Now Click "Next" and enter the deployment file name and locate the license file that will be packaged with the application
We now have a mort.war file that we can deploy to PCF
If you have followed the initial PCF tutorial then you already have the PCF Command line installed and working on your computer. If you havent....well you can download the PCF Command line installer from https://cli.run.pivotal.io/stable?release=windows64&source=github
At this point if you open up a command line shell, I use powerShell you should be able to type
PS C:\deployments> cf help
All good then lets continue
cd to the directory where you placed your mort.war deployment file. The general outline of deploying a war file to PCF is cf push <APPNAME> -p APPNAME.war
so for our mort application that becomes
PS C:\deployments> cf push mort -p mort.war
Wait a few minutes and watch as the java and tomcat buildpacks are downloaded into the pcf container and your application is then deployed and started.
In our case this application is available under https://mort.cfapps.io/servlet
As a little freebie I also deployed an Angular Javascript application that acts as a new web front end to this mort CICS application and you can view that here. https://ang2mort.cfapps.io/
Hope you have enjoyed this article and seen how simple it is to push your CICS applications to the cloud.
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