Setting up the target environment

Before you start to develop your application, you must set up a target definition in Eclipse for the earliest level of CICS your application runs in. A target definition consists of a set of plug-ins and environment settings, for example, JCICS API, JRE and any custom APIs you might use. When you set a target environment, you ensure that you use only the classes that are supported in a specific release of CICS.

Procedure

  1. Click Window > Preferences from the workbench menu bar to open the Preferences dialog. Expand Plug-in Development and click Target Platform. The Target Platform pane shows the target definitions that already exist in your Eclipse environment. If your target platform is already in the list, ignore the following steps and go straight to the What to do next section later in this topic.
  2. Click Add to add a new target definition. The New Target wizard opens.
  3. Click the Template radio button and click the twistie. CICS® provides a run time template containing all the plug-ins for each level of CICS that you can build your application for. If you are developing for a Liberty JVM, select CICS TS 5.1 Runtime with Liberty, otherwise select CICS TS 5.1 Runtime, then click Next. The Target Definition editor is displayed. Using the editor you can change the properties of your target definitions, add other library bundles that are installed in CICS runtime, change the Java level, and so on. In most instances the default properties are suitable but you can change them if required. For more help about the editor tabs, press the F1 key (Ctrl+F1 on Linux).
  4. Click Finish.

Results

The Target Definition editor closes and the target definition is added to the Target Platform list. You can repeat the steps to add other target definitions.

What to do next

You must select the target platform for which you want to develop the application. Select the check box alongside your target platform and click OK. If you set a target environment for CICS TS 5.1, you might get a warning message indicating that you have selected a target with a newer version than your current Eclipse installation. You can ignore this warning message.

The target environment is now set up and is used to build the application. You can now develop your CICS Java application. CICS provides example programs that show you how to use the JCICS classes, and how to combine Java™ programs with CICS programs written in other languages. See the related link for more information.