IBM Mainframe Forum

We have a requirement for an existing COBOL application to act as a client
and consume web services. Our application has both Batch and CICS variants.

From the research I've done this seems relatively straight forward in CICS TS,
CICS TS Gateway, SOAP for CICS etc using the built in EXEC commands to
access web services ( I may be wrong?), but how can we do this in a Batch
environment?

Ideally we could use the IBM products we already have installed and ideally would
be fairly simple in the first instance to prove the concept. We have the following
products installed on our z9 that may be relevant to this exercise.

z/OS 1.9
CICS TS for z/OS v3
CICS
Enterprise COBOL v3.4
XL C/C++
XML Toolkit for z/OS
XML Toolkit for z/OS and os/390 SS
SDK for z/OS S&S
IBM 31 bit SDK for z/OS v6
DB2 v9
DB2 Utilities suite for z/OS v8
DB2 UDB v8 for z/OS
DB2 Managment clients
Net.data v7
DB2 Utilities suite for z/OS v8
DB2 Utilities suite for z/OS S&S

We also have WebSphere application server, Websphere MQ v6, WBI Message
Broker for z/OS S&S, WS Message Broker etc but for business reasons we don't
really want to consider these as part of the solution at present.

Any thoughts and comments are greatly appreciated. Many thanks in advance.

I've being doing a little more research and came across CICS External Interfaces
(EXCI) which seems to allow a non-CICS program to communicate with a CICS
program.

Since CICS seems to have the inbuilt functionlity to act as a web server / client
would it be possible to write a CICS program (in COBOL) to handle the communication
to the web and then simply call this program from Batch COBOL using the EXEC CICS
LINK command?

Any thoughts?