Micro Focus Visual COBOL 3.0 for Eclipse (Windows) > Welcome > New Customers: Where do I start? > New to Eclipse

New to Eclipse

Visual COBOL uses a proven industry Integrated Development Environment that provides advanced features for COBOL editing and debugging for application developers. Continuous background compilation, code analysis, code search, and remote compiling and debugging are just a few of the many developer tools available to streamline application delivery. In addition, you can utilize REST and JSON to build new web services, create new user interfaces using HTML-5 and combine COBOL with Java and other Java Virtual Machine (JVM) languages - all within one IDE.

Where to start?

If you've never used Eclipse before, this product help includes the following resources to help you get started:

Eclipse Basics, an overview of the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment.
A tutorial, Create your first Hello COBOL World application, that demonstrates how you create an Eclipse project for a COBOL program and demonstrates the basic features of the IDE.
Advanced Details, section to learn about the Eclipse resource system and what the development life cycle in Eclipse is.
A tutorial, Configure the Hello COBOL World application, that demonstrates how to configure a project and resolve some build issues.
A tutorial, Debug the Hello COBOL World application, that demonstrates how debugging works in Eclipse.

What next?

Visual COBOL is a powerful development environment with a variety of features and tools suited to help you get on with your programming effectively and efficiently.

See the tutorials for examples of applications you can create with Visual COBOL.
See Developing Applications for more information about creating applications.
Find out more about the various ways you can debug applications.
Read about how to create remote applications.

A number of Micro Focus videos are available on YouTube showing you how to perform various programming tasks. For example, the following videos show how you can expose COBOL applications as Web services: