Copyright International Business Machines Corporation 1982, 1995. All rights reserved. The simplest form of CICS communication is between CICS and a nonprogrammable terminal. Next is between CICS and programmable workstation clients. End users remain unaware of how communication takes place, which is driven by applications using EXEC CICS API commands to send and receive data.
System programming shields the application programmer from the details of networks and data formats.
This allows the business application to be isolated from the technicalities of the communications themselves. In doing so, they can share workloads. The following table summarizes the protocols for communicating from one member of the CICS family to another. In every case, the CICS systems will use the same underlying communication subsystems and protocols to achieve their ends. The CICS name for each facility is followed in parentheses by the generic industry term.