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When your product predates the moon landing, there’s a certain way of doing things. That’s certainly the case with IBM CICS – a product introduced in 1968. By the end of business today it will have processed billions of transactions from ATM withdrawals, insurance policies, utility bill payments and the like. Whenever I feel like I’ve had a productive day, I think of CICS and instantly feel a vague sense of disappointment in my own puny achievements.

Today CICS is a modern transaction processor supporting modern programming interfaces. Recently the CICS team partnered with my IBM Redbooks organization and asked a question: “How can we educate Java developers on the creation of applications with CICS?” The default answer to questions like this has always been to publish a book or a paper. There are dozens of IBM Redbooks publications covering many aspects of CICS. But would this audience engage with those traditional delivery methods? Would a Java developer expect to open a PDF book and scroll down to page 175 to find an answer?

Probably not, and that was the inspiration behind the IBM Redbooks video course Developing a RESTful Web application for Liberty in CICS. It’s a combination of modular short videos and code samples stored in a Git repository. A Java developer or even a CICS COBOL programmer looking to learn Java can navigate through the course. It is broken up into sections and lectures, videos can be played that address areas of interest, and topics can be recreated through supplied Java and COBOL code samples.

Here are the topics you’ll find in the video course:

• Concepts and terms used in Java and RESTful applications
• Installing and configuring z/OS Explorer and CICS Explorer
• Creating an Eclipse environment for developing CICS Java applications
• Configuring CICS to run Java applications in a Liberty JVM server
• Developing the application, using the supplied sample course materials
• Deploying and testing the application in CICS
• Extending the sample Java application in order to access other CICS programs

Turns out creating this type of content is quite different from pulling together a book. There’s the obvious stuff – video shoots, scripting and video editing. And then there were new things to consider. We had dozens of PowerPoint charts, but how should those be presented on screen? We spent weeks building a style guide that utilized IBM Design principals to define what every graphic, line of text and animation should look like.

We launched on Valentine’s Day and nervously monitored the viewership metrics. Would our core CICS audience conditioned on a lifetime of books and papers embrace this new approach? Three days later we had our answer. The video course was the most visited page on the entire Redbooks site, barring the home page. Video views and downloads continue to climb and in response we’re already working on our next two CICS video courses. And now that we’ve been through the process once we’re getting more efficient at producing these videos. Just not quite as efficient as CICS – another day, another few billion transactions processed.

Take the CICS video course: Developing a RESTful Web application for Liberty in CICS.

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