{Ecosystem} In a companion article titled “CA JCLCheck and Zowe ensure that JCL runs successfully at your site”, I describe how Open Mainframe Project’s Zowe technology has expanded the capabilities of Broadcom’s “CA JCLCheck™ Workload Automation” so that JCLCheck can be accessed through REST requests and by command-line scripting from remote hosts.

REST API programming and command-line scripting are great. You can trigger JCL validation from a custom application, a script on your laptop, or within a CI/CD pipeline. However, some consumers will want on-demand validation of JCL that they are currently editing. …

Introduction

{Core} Gregory MacKinnon’s article titled “Zowe API Security — securing the open mainframe” and Dan Kelosky’s article titled “Zowe CLI: Token Authentication, MFA, and SSO” provide an important foundational understanding of security concepts that lead to Zowe CLI’s use of tokens to authenticate a user. In this article I describe the reasons why token handling is important for the Open Mainframe Project’s Zowe CLI, how tokens operate in the CLI, and how consumers configure and use tokens.

In a companion article titled “Token Handling in Zowe CLI plug-ins” I describe how development teams can modify Zowe CLI plug-ins to be…

Introduction

{Core} In the article titled Using tokens in the Zowe CLI, I describe how and why tokens are used in the Zowe CLI. In this article, I describe how Zowe CLI contributors can modify their Zowe CLI plug-ins to use authentication tokens.

All core Zowe commands have already been modified to work with tokens. For a Zowe CLI plug-in to gain token-handling capabilities, the plug-in development team must make the programming modifications described below.

Some profile options should no longer be required

The following options can be stored in a base profile: host, port, user, password, rejectUnauthorized, tokenType, and tokenValue.

If you want any of these options to…

A key concept within the Zowe ecosystem is the creation of a REST infrastructure API to access the functionality of an existing application. A component named zowe-rest-api-commons-spring provides a layer of functionality on top of Spring Boot to facilitate writing a REST service that interacts with a z/OS application. The “commons” component can be found within the GitHub repository: sample-spring-boot-api-service. You can use capabilities provided by the commons component when writing your own REST API, which include:

• Authentication
• Authorization
• Running a thread with the security environment of your end user
• Facilitating the discovery of your API by the Zowe API…