NeoKicks
The NeoKicks strategy is to bring your CICS applications fully into the .NET world, completely changing your perspective on your CICS programs. Rather than seeing them as limited by character interfaces and the abilities provided by a single mainframe vendor, the applications are freed to grow using the latest technologies and interface designs that are being developed by the myriad of companies targeting Microsoft's .NET environment.
NeoKicks provides a wizard that takes your CICS COBOL programs and associated BMS maps, converts them to the .NET-compatible forms, and populates a Visual Studio project so that you are ready to start building and testing your migrated code. At runtime NeoKicks services handle the CICS commands, providing the equivalent .NET functionality.
- NeoKicks Project Wizard imports your CICS COBOL code into Visual Studio projects, preprocessing EXEC CICS statements into the NeoKicks equivalents
- Wizard also converts your screens into ASP.NET Web Forms that you maintain using Visual Studio's designers
- NeoKicks Services provide runtime support for CICS commands
- Configure styles of your converted BMS maps using ASP.NET master pages and cascading style sheets
- CICS ECI (External Call Interface) transactions convert to Web services
- Integration with Visual Studio gives productive and easy-to-use development environment
- Support for any data base connection, with transaction coordination when the data base supports distributed transactions
- User interface and application tiers are separable allowing flexible deployment options
- Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) Management Pack provided for SCOM monitoring of critical failure events
- Mainframe UI behaviors emulated such as: overtype behavior, tabbing behavior, PF keys, PA keys & Break
CICS modernization with NeoKicks provides the following compelling benefits:
- Cost effective, scalable, hardware platform - Windows servers have very attractive price:performance ratios
- Escape from a proprietary hardware and software environment in which enhancements come from a single vendor
- Enter an open environment where enhancements and new technologies are being provided by multiple vendors
- Modernize application interfaces (in a controlled manner - opt for mainframe look and feel until you are ready to move to GUI)
- Expose existing business logic as Web services
- Provide your programmers with the world's best development environment (Visual Studio)
