Master of the Mainframe

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October 25, 2004 (Computerworld) -- Jim Rhyne, an IBM distinguished engineer, is the company's lead architect for non-Java application development tools and CICS, IBM's enduring mainframe transaction-processing middleware, which recently celebrated its 35th birthday. As part of his job, Rhyne works with customers to modernize their old mainframe environments. He spoke with Computerworld's Robert L. Mitchell about CICS, Web services and the future of the mainframe.

IBM's CICS transaction-processing middleware is now 35 years old. What is its future? At the beginning, CICS was a very crude set of libraries built for what was then the IBM 360 operating system. Over the years, it has matured from a programming library into something that's strikingly similar to what we have in WebSphere today. It provides application containers that not only support transaction behavior but resource management. It supports scale-out.
It's going to remain as a high-end, high-speed, high-throughput atomic transaction-processing system. You'll find WebSphere taking over the low end of the transaction-processing marketplace and much of the middle as well. [CICS] is going to be a full player in this on-demand integrated computing environment that IBM is promoting. You'll find aggregations of software designed to handle Web browsers, designed to handle external interactions mediated by Web services. Behind that will be transaction-processing databases, and we expect CICS to be one of the premier solutions that we offer.

What emerging technologies are affecting CICS and mainframes? XML and Web services, service-oriented architectures -- this is the big thing that's hitting the mainframe. If you look at the composition of SOA, there is a universal connectivity part, then there is componentization -- taking monolithic applications and breaking them down into reusable chunks of business logic. That was easy to apply to user interface and client-side programming. Now we're getting around to using it in a serious way on the server side.

Jim Rhyne, lead architect for non-Java application development tools and CICS at IBM

How do you bridge mainframes with Web services? The integration software [for CICS] is going to be J2EE and Java. CICS applications change, and when they do, there's an outward ripple into the WebSphere environment.
From a development point of view, if I make a change to a CICS application, it's not easy to find and change the corresponding set of WebSphere applications that use it. What you have is a mixed workload application. From a management point of view, I want to manage this as a single entity. The most important thing [programmers] can do is to understand the other technologies you have to interface with. It's a lot easier for these communities to operate as teams if they understand each other's technologies.

Where will the mainframe be in five years?
It's difficult to predict. Part of the reason is that on hardware, we seem to be approaching a discontinuity. For years, we've had a Moore's Law, given that machines consume less power and they run faster [as time goes on]. Well, we're getting close to the end now.
At that point in time, if you look at how you are going to meet the demands for computing, the only option left is to go into large-scale multiprocessing - thousands of parallel processors, or even tens of thousands -- instead of the few dozen we have today.
My guess is mainframe applications will have to undergo a substantial amount of change because they were built essentially as single-threaded software. The mainframe will be hit by this, a lot of the Unix applications will be hit by this, and the Mac OS and Windows are also going to be hit by this. It will be a big game-changer, and my [crystal] ball is pretty cloudy about what's going to happen.

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Sidebar: IBM's Rhyne on Mainframe Strategy for Today Master of the Mainframe

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• Sidebar: IBM's Rhyne on Mainframe Strategy for Today
• Master of the Mainframe

• Update: Microsoft to appeal $1.3B EU fine
• XP SP3 cripples some PCs with endless reboots
• Windows Vista more secure than XP, says security company
• More top stories 

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