In CICS®, Web-aware application programs are programs that use EXEC CICS WEB commands to interact with a Web client or a server through CICS. For CICS as an HTTP server, these programs can receive and analyze HTTP requests and provide application-generated responses to the Web client.
Before you start to code Web-aware application programs for CICS as an HTTP server, read the topic HTTP request and response processing for CICS as an HTTP server so that you are aware of the processing stages that can be involved.
If you want the service you are providing to Web clients to be compliant with the HTTP protocol specifications, in particular HTTP/1.1, read the topic HTTP/1.1 compliance for CICS as an HTTP server for more information about the actions that CICS and your user application can take to achieve this.
For CICS as an HTTP server, when an application program has sent a response to a request and returned control to CICS, it does not wait for further requests from the Web client. This is the case even when requests form a logical sequence, or are made using a persistent connection, or are pipelined. If you need to share information between different programs (or new instances of the same program) across a series of requests and responses, you can do this using CICS-managed resources, or using elements of the requests sent by the Web client.
You can code each of your Web-aware application programs to perform some or all of the following actions for processing an HTTP request: