The CICS® family provides robust transaction processing capabilities across the major hardware platforms that IBM® offers, and also across key non-IBM platforms. It offers a wide range of features for supporting client/server applications, and allows the use of modern graphical interfaces for presenting information to the end-user. The CICS family now supports the emerging technology for object oriented programming and offers CICS users a way of capitalizing on many of the benefits of object technology while making use of their investment in CICS skills, data and applications.
Object oriented programming allows more realistic models to be built in flexible programming languages that allow you to define new types or classes of objects, as well as employing a variety of structures to represent these objects.
Object oriented programming also allows you to create methods (member functions) that define the behavior associated with objects of a certain type, capturing more of the meaning of the underlying data.
The CICS foundation classes software is a set of facilities that IBM has added to CICS to make it easier for application programmers to develop object oriented programs. It is not intended to be a product in its own right.
The CICS C++ foundation classes, as described here, allow an application programmer to access many of the CICS services that are available via the EXEC CICS procedural application programming interface (API). They also provide an object model, making OO application development simpler and more intuitive.
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