ALCS, which stands for Airline Control System, is an application server that provides industrial-strength, online transaction management for mission-critical applications.
ALCS is a transaction processing monitor for the
IBM System/360
The IBM System/360 (S/360) is a family of mainframe computer systems that was announced by IBM on April 7, 1964, and delivered between 1965 and 1978. It was the first family of computers designed to cover both commercial and scientific applic ...
,
System/370,
ESA/390, and
zSeries mainframes. It is a variant of
TPF TPF may refer to:
* Tibial plateau fracture
* Theodore Payne Foundation for Wild Flowers and Native Plants
* Transaction Processing Facility, an operating system by IBM
* Terrestrial Planet Finder, a proposed system of telescopes to detect extrasola ...
specially designed to provide all the benefits of TPF (very high speed, high volume, and high availability in transaction processing) but with the advantages such as easier integration into the data center offered by running on a standard IBM operating system platform.
Like TPF, it is primarily used in the airline, hotel, and banking industries.
Whereas TPF runs as a stand-alone OS, ALCS is designed to run as an application on top of
MVS/
OS/390/
z/OS
z/OS is a 64-bit operating system for IBM z/Architecture mainframes, introduced by IBM in October 2000. It derives from and is the successor to OS/390, which in turn was preceded by a string of MVS versions.Starting with the earliest:
...
. However, the API it provides to applications is very similar to that on
TPF TPF may refer to:
* Tibial plateau fracture
* Theodore Payne Foundation for Wild Flowers and Native Plants
* Transaction Processing Facility, an operating system by IBM
* Terrestrial Planet Finder, a proposed system of telescopes to detect extrasola ...
, so applications written for TPF can run on ALCS with minimal modifications: typically fewer modifications than are required to move from one release of TPF to another. ALCS 2.3.1 runs on
OS/390 2.10 and
z/OS
z/OS is a 64-bit operating system for IBM z/Architecture mainframes, introduced by IBM in October 2000. It derives from and is the successor to OS/390, which in turn was preceded by a string of MVS versions.Starting with the earliest:
...
. ALCS 2.4.1 was released in June 2008.
Because it runs under standard IBM operating systems, it can easily leverage other developments or enhancements on those platforms. For example, to enable
MQSeries for TPF required the porting, modification, and authoring of large volumes of code. To enable this on ALCS, only an interface to the MQ product on z/OS needed to be written. And any enhancements made to MQ Series on z/OS by the MQ team are available without any additional work on the part of the ALCS development team. This also applies to
TCP/IP,
Db2
Db2 is a family of data management products, including database servers, developed by IBM. It initially supported the relational model, but was extended to support object–relational features and non-relational structures like JSON and ...
,
VTAM, to a certain extent language support and even basic disk I/O.
References
IBM: ALCSALCS Users
IBM mainframe software