Re: IBM i CICS is going away. No direct replacement.

Hello John,

Am 28.08.2024 um 15:45 schrieb John Yeung <gallium.arsenide@xxxxxxxxx>:

Don't fix what ain't broken.

My dad felt the same way about changing the oil in his car.

Srsly? There's no mechanical abrasion in software, unable to increase viscosity in lubrication liquids.

Yes, absolutely seriously.

I wanted to point out that his analogy to a mechanical contraption is IMHO hilarious. Software ages because everything else is constantly reworked. Or bugs become known and more likely to be exploited.

Also, one can always find reasons to change things or to leave them as they are. Even the same things, just depending on the person who's in charge.

Did you notice that Rob mentioned other components that are going away, which may or may not be dependencies?

Yes. Browsing through this list on the posted web page, I don't see anything which obviously is required by CICS. Not even BiSync, which is merely a serial protocol.

You can get your system to a desired state that "works" and just leave it there.

Not necessarily. The world turns for me, too. And getting data into and out of my machine in various ways is something I highly desire. Since I do have a Linux machine exposed to the internet (which need to talk to my outdated machinery — of every kind), I'm also required to keep it up to date. This had impacts in the past and will have further impacts in the future. Luckily I did not yet encounter an absolute show stopper.

But apparently the discussion is dragged towards a similar direction as it were with the SDA-goes-away-discussion.

But for people who manage systems that have to interact in some way with the outside world, or have to evolve for whatever reason, there is absolutely the chance that software that has been working well enough for a while will gradually (or suddenly!) work less well, and may break altogether, without proper maintenance.

What makes you think this is different for me?

To a lesser extent and with no business impact, though.

Also, I highly doubt there is much need for change imposed (by external forces) for CICS applications running on IBM i.

And even electronic hardware fails eventually, and software running on that hardware will fail, even if the code is absolutely perfect in every way.

Yes, but how does that relate to CICS being phased out?

TL;DR, some analogies aren't "valid". :-)

:wq! PoC