Z Application Platform Talks

Today Will Yates visits us and we talked about his career in Testing and how he learned to like IBM Z and CICS. He and his Team also invented and open sourced a Framework named Galasa that provides users with many years of experience that has been build up by the CICS Team in Hursley. 

In todays session we have Joe Winchester with us, who originally wanted to do microbiology, stuff but somehow ended up in IT. Here he is very busy making the IBM Z platform more accessible and open. Join us for a journey on open source development and CLIs, APIs and all the fun stuff Joe did and still does in his career.

Listen to Tony share some stories about the journey he’s been on with IBM Z, the changes he’s seen and how he became the Technical Strategy Lead for Integration on the platform. We’ll be talking to him about how z/OS Connect EE has evolved to be the market leading API enablement solution for Z, what trends he’s seeing and what might be coming next in the integration space.

Did you know IMS is not just a Database, it is a Transaction Server as well and even it has been around since the 60s, it learns new tricks every day. Learn with us from Haley and Deepak out of the IMS Development Team what to expect from IMS next and how customers add new technologies to their most critical applications and administration of IMS itself.

In this episode we have Phil Wakelin with us who works with Java on Z Customers all over the world. He shares his insights on why customers use Java and how customers adopt it on IBM Z. Especially the provided Frameworks allow customers to really move forward quickly. Join our little journey and understand also how customers can stepwise move to newer programming languages like Java.

In this session on the virtual couch, we invited Stew Francis to discuss how our Runtimes have evolved to be easier to use by people that have never met IBM Z before. Stew has quite a history in that area as he also worked a lot on the CICS Explorer and now works on technology and function that help Developers to interact with IBM Z, like Maven and Gradle, whilst also helping system Programmers to automate and script their interaction with Z using Ansible.

Modern Application Architectures for Application Platforms on IBM Z

Description: Ian Mitchell worked for a long time in CICS and now helps customers on modernising their systems. In this first session about future application architectures, we discussed how the architecture will shape the application as such and help to make it more maintainable and future proof. We really got into the topic and plan to have another talk to follow up on many of the points we ran out of time to cover that we wanted to discuss! But we do have some good reads for you in the meantime:

- Eric Evans - Domain Driven Design 

https://www.domainlanguage.com/ddd

-Sam Newmann - Monolith to Microservices

https://samnewman.io/books/monolith-to-microservices

In this Episode, we invited Fraser Bohm, the chief architect for CICS and AI Ops, onto our virtual couch. he explains to us how the trends in Development change what Runtimes need to provide and what new things will come up next.  He also gave us some history around why IBM CICS is actually implemented in a micro-service fashion. Even he did not have his crystal ball with him, but he still took time to share some new trends and what he thinks will come next in this space.

In this Episode, we will explain why we thought we need to have a podcast that explains what trends and directions are implemented in the IBM Z Runtimes and Application Platforms and the Runtimes. In the future Episodes, we will go into a lot of topics and invite interesting Guests to understand what are the important things now and what will come next!