Using Eclipse for COBOL Development

You can create, debug and run COBOL applications on your local machine or on a remote server. You use Eclipse features such as the COBOL and Remote Systems Explorer perspectives within the IDE to background check syntax as well as build and debug your COBOL programs. As in other Micro Focus products, you use COBOL-specific projects to aid your everyday development activities within the IDE. This provides familiar functionality for editing, compiling, and debugging, complete with comprehensive COBOL Help.

The features of the COBOL development system include:

Perspectives to show the appropriate panes and views in the IDE such as the Remote System Explorer, COBOL, and Debug.
Editing features such as:
- Background parse for syntax checking
- Code templates by pressing ctrl space
- Outline view
- Code completion
- Collapse/expand
- Code colorization
Project handling, such as:
- Automatic building
- Dependency checking
- ANT as the engine
- Build Precedence ordering for directories
- SQL directive support
- Multiple build configurations
Debug configurations, which you can reuse for different debugging scenarios. In addition to standard debugging you can:
- Attach to a running application. This allows you to attach a debugger to an already running COBOL application.
- Wait for attachment. This process starts a debugger a waits for a COBOL application to attach.
Comprehensive debugging features such as:
- Breakpoints
- Expressions view
- Stack trace
- Stepping
- Variables view
- Watchpoints

Note: When working with local SQL applications on UNIX, ensure the RDBMS environment is set before you start Eclipse. Refer to your RDBMS vendor's documentation for details.

Developing applications remotely

When you develop COBOL remote applications, you use a remote server running Visual COBOL Development Hub to host your source code, and use the Eclipse IDE on your local machine as the development interface.

Working with a remote machine allows you to develop and host applications on UNIX and Linux servers while using a Windows or Linux hosted Eclipse IDE. In this scenario, all source code is maintained on the remote server. In addition, no actual build processing occurs on the machine hosting the Eclipse IDE. Instead, all processing tasks including editing, compilation and debugging are performed on the remote server. Copying files between the local client and the remote server using FTP for example, is not required.