Features Added in Enterprise Developer 2.0

Eclipse as the Integrated Development Environment

Eclipse is the core IDE for maintaining and developing applications that have been migrated from the mainframe and that still use CICS and JCL. You use Eclipse to develop, compile as native or managed COBOL code, and debug your applications. The Eclipse editor has been extended in a number of ways to enhance its support for COBOL, including standard Eclipse features for program navigation are exploited for COBOL applications.

Features Include:

Latest Version of the Eclipse IDE

Enterprise Developer supports the latest version of Eclipse - Eclipse 3.7.1 Indigo.

COBOL-Aware Eclipse Editor

Includes various features such as syntax colorization and background parsing, COBOL comment structures, column block marking. The editor displays the COBOL margins and utilizes the Eclipse program navigation features in COBOL such as the Outline view, Find References and in-place copybook expansion.

The Eclipse debugger fully supports COBOL in data queries, watch windows etc. and control over the program execution flow both for native code and COBOL JVM.

COBOL Explorer View

Provides a logical view of the files in your projects and allows you to navigate around COBOL projects in a more useful and convenient way than the default Eclipse Navigator view.

COBOL File Search

Makes it easier to find certain files within your projects.

Copybook Context

Enables you to choose in which program context a copybook displays.

Auto-completion and Content Assist

The IDE includes auto-completion and content assist editing features.

Automatic Directives Detection and Setting

The IDE automatically determines and sets the COBOL dialect, and the CICS and SQL directives on local or remote native COBOL projects. You can also start a directives scan from within COBOL Explorer - select Determine Directives from the context menu for the projects or the COBOL source files. This triggers a scan to determine the COBOL dialect, the CICS and SQL settings, and sets them as Compiler directives on a file or project level respectively. At the end of the scan, you view the results and choose to apply the changes.

COBOL Projects

Supports creating, debugging and running of COBOL projects in the IDE. You can set the charset of new projects to ASCII or EBCDIC, and also set the COBOL dialect (for example, EntCOBOL, VSC2, OSVS). The following project types are available:

Mainframe Subsystem projects - enable you to build Mainframe Subsystem applications and provide support for BMS, JCL and Macro files.
Note: This release does not provide support for IMS applications.
COBOL projects - enable you to create native COBOL applications.
COBOL JVM projects - enable you to create managed COBOL applications which compile to JVM byte code (.class files) so that they can be run on a JVM.

Compiling Single Files

You can compile individual COBOL source files without rebuilding your entire project. Build Automatically on the Project menu must be turned off.

Support for Editing .DAT Files

You can edit .dat files in a text editor in the IDE, or using the Micro Focus Data File Tools utility.

Note: This release does not provide support for IMS applications.

Enterprise Server integrated into the IDE

Features include:

A Server Explorer view that enables you to manage the instances of Enterprise Server on multiple hosts.
Direct access to the Enterprise Server Administration page from within Server Explorer.
Ability to associate a project with an Enterprise Server instance.
Submission of JCL to selected Enterprise Server instance.
A debug launch configuration for Enterprise Server debugging. This enables you to debug programs started from CICS or JCL sessions on an Enterprise Server instance.

Mainframe Subsystem Support in the Eclipse IDE

Features Include:

MSS-specfic project template, including BMS, JCL and Macro file support:
- COBOL Explorer view offers additional categories for BMS, JCL and Macro files.
- The COBOL Search feature recognises BMS, JCL and Macro file types
Automatic determination of CICS COBOL programs.
Automatic determination of the COBOL dialects.
Ability to set CICS and BMS settings on project, configuration, or on file level.
Support for CICS ECM.
Compilation of CICS COBOL programs.
Editing BMS mapsets - in a text editor in the IDE with Content Assist, or using the external Micro Focus BMS Painter tool.
Outline View of BMS mapsets.
Compilation of BMS files and error reporting location.
Editing of JCL files in the text editor with Content Assist.

Enterprise Server

Features include:

Configuration of enterprise servers using the Administration Web interface.
Dynamic debugging of applications that are running under an enterprise server
Deployment of mainframe and native code applications to an enterprise server.
CICS Web Interface (CWI) Offers an additional CICS Web Interface (CWI) support to include DOCUMENT and EXTRACT TCPIP CICS APIs and to provide support for CICS as an HTTP client.

Mainframe Access (MFA) Client Capabilities

Enterprise Developer and Enterprise Test Server provide Mainframe Access (MFA) client capabilities.

When migrating applications, this ensures source and data can be transferred from the mainframe and projects can be setup more efficiently within the Enterprise Developer environment to make it easier to demonstrate rapid progress to key stake holders. Once projects are set up, the synchronization with mainframe artifacts can be automated to deliver significant gains in efficiency.

When rehosting testing workload to Windows, this provides:

Seamless but secure access to mainframe application source code and data simplifies set up and deployment of the Test Server platform.
Significantly increases the breadth of applications that can be tested within the Enterprise Test Server environment as jobs, programs and utilities that cannot be rehosted to Windows can be remotely accessed on the mainframe.
Allows source synchronization with mainframe source control systems. Test Server can then be configured to automatically compile changes as they are checked into source libraries. This provides early exposure to test teams performing smoke or regression testing.
Data can continue to reside on the mainframe. COBOL programs running under Test Server can directly access mainframe files. This not only allows multiple test levels against different subsets of data, it means that sensitive or archive data can remain in position.
MFA Synchronisation and Control Monitor (aka "Syncmon") – synchronises selected source components between mainframe hosted source and a Windows development or test environment
Automatic Synchronise and Compile to automatically compile modules after source code synchronisation.
Remote Job (JCL) Step Execution to enable execution of jobs on mainframe that cannot be rehosted to Windows
Mainframe Call Generator – enables remote execution of mainframe programs that cannot be re-hosted to Windows.
SourceConnect – allows direct access to source hosted on mainframe.
DataConnect – allows COBOL file access to data files hosted on mainframe.

Service Interfaces Using the IMTK

Important: We highly recommend that you do the IMTK tutorials to get a feel for using these tools. See Tutorials: Interface Mapping Toolkit (IMTK) in the Enterprise Developer Tutorials Guide section under Native COBOL Tutorials.

The IMTK enables you to create an interface between a COBOL application running on an enterprise server instance as a service, such as a Web service or Java service, and a client, such as a Web service client or a JSP client. The interface you create is called a service interface.

You can create the following types of service interfaces for COBOL programs:

Web service
Java Interface

For service interfaces created from a new or existing COBOL application, you can expose as much or as little of the application functionality as you choose. Because COBOL applications often perform a wide variety of functions, the creation of a service interface enables you to limit your end users to access only the functions they need.

You can also use a WSDL or JSON file provided by a third party to generate both a service interface that supports the described Web service, and a skeleton COBOL program containing the data structures needed to support the Web service. You can then further enhance the COBOL program to contain the logic necessary to return the required output.

Attention: To deploy or generate a client for a Java Interface, you must install and configure the Java JDK and a Java application server. See the Application Server JCA support for Enterprise Server topic under Additional Software Requirements.

The process of creating a working service interface to run on Enterprise Server includes the following:

Creating and configuring an enterprise server instance to run the legacy application as a service
Creating a service interface in an Enterprise Developer project
Defining the details of the service interface using the Interface Mapper
Deploying the application and service interface to your enterprise server instance
Generating one or more clients to access the service running on the enterprise server instance

Support for the PL/I Language

The Micro Focus Open PL/I Compiler, Debugger and Runtime are included into the Enterprise Developer and Enterprise Server products to enable Micro Focus to offer a comprehensive, low-risk migration solution for mainframe Pl/I applications.
Features include:
- Shared file handling between Micro Focus COBOL and Open PL/I - Open PL/I enables you to use the same filehandler as used by the Micro Focus COBOL products. Its primary advantage is that it provides support for Indexed files and the ability to execute PL/I programs under the control of Enterprise Server JCL.
- Shared Memory handling and Corruption detection with the Micro Focus COBOL run-time system.
- Shared Signal Handling with the Micro Focus run-time system.
Improved support for large PL/I programs.
Supports the WIDECHAR data type (and the built-in functions associated with it).
Improved debugging capabilities for applications under development and running in production which help increase the programmers' productivity during and after migration.
Support for the PLIDUMP() facility which generates a callstack and shows all static variables, local variables and API parameters that were in effect at the time of the call to PLIDUMP. PLIDUMP is typically used to analyze application failures while running in production.
Support for an enhanced PLITEST API which allows for dynamic attachment of the PL/I Debugger at a point the application programmer specifies. In addition, the PLITEST interface now has the capability of displaying the Codewatch Debugger UI on any platform capable of hosting an X-Windows Server.
Generation of ASA Control Characters when writing to PL/I files with the STREAM and PRINT attributes. When writing PL/I files that are defined to have the STREAM and PRINT attributes, appropriate control characters are now written to column 1 of the output dataset to represent a new page, skip(1), skip(2), skip(3), and skip(0) (known as overstrike). This helps ease the migration and integration of PL/I applications with existing printing subsystems.
OpenESQL for PL/I - Support for Microsoft SQL Server within Open PL/I included within Enterprise Developer and Enterprise Test Server is available as an early adopter release. This provides the option to select Microsoft SQL Server as the target database when migrating PL/I applications that utilize DB2.
- The mature OpenESQL technology Micro Focus has supported for many years for its COBOL customers, is now available for use with PL/I applications. This means PL/I SQL can now execute against popular relational databases like Microsoft SQL Server even though a SQL preprocessor for PL/I is not available from the database vendor.
- This support is classified as "Early Adopter". It has been successfully tested by Micro Focus development but has only been exposed to a limited amount of customer application code.
The PL/I Dynamic Calls (FETCH/RELEASE) are supported. This provides greater efficiency during migration and less risk as applications using dynamic calls can be rehosted without significant changes to application logic.
DB2 UDB Precompiler - A DB2 UDB Precompiler is now available on all platforms for Open PL/I. This feature allows you to migrate applications which contain EXEC SQL logic.
Support for the PLISRTx routines to support data types of ZD, PD, FI, BI, and FL.
Open PL/I DB2 LUW Preprocessor - the Open PL/I DB2 LUW Preprocessor supports ROWID, BLOB and CLOB which widens the breadth of applications that can be rehosted. Without this support, applications using such features would not be considered as candidates for migration due to the significant reengineering that would be required.
Improved Language compatibility with IBM's z/OS based PL/I Compiler - applications that use these IBM mainframe PL/I language features do not need code modification to function in the same manner using Open PL/I. This reduces risk while accelerating migration of such programs.
Support for Open PL/I applications that utilize CICS within Enterprise Server. This provides the ability to re-host mainframe PL/I applications to lower cost Windows, UNIX or Linux platforms while keeping PL/I code intact to minimize risk. Features include:
- A new PL/I CICS precompiler.
- Enhanced source level debugging.
- PL/I RTS support for CICS applications.
Support for IMS/DB and IMS/TM applications - Open PL/I supports the PLITDLI and PLIHSSR interfaces. Customers who wish to migrate their PL/I Online or Batch applications that utilize IMS can now run them on Enterprise Server.

SQL

The SQL technology that was present in previous products is seamlessly integrated within the Eclipse development environment. When you develop COBOL SQL applications in the new IDE, you can use the same development environment to extend and modernize your COBOL assets.

Features include:

Improved IDE integration for all SQL technologies - now supports handling of deprecated and removed directives. Also supports filtering of the choices offered to the user by product type, project type, and platform
SQL Option for DB2 technology that provides mainframe DB2 compatibility with its own DBMS, tooling and COBOL preprocessor
HCO for DB2 LUW technology that provides mainframe DB2 compatibility with its own tooling and COBOL preprocessor
HCO for SQL Server (HCOSS) - HCOSS makes it simple to migrate both COBOL code and data from mainframe DB2 to SQL Server.