Converting
Net Express Projects
You can upgrade your existing COBOL applications that were developed in
Net Express to
Visual COBOL and continue to develop them there making use of the
Eclipse industry Integrated Development Environment that supports thousands of clients for developing and deploying critical business
applications.
Visual COBOL includes a Net Express Project Import Wizard that converts Net Express projects into
Eclipse projects. The wizard analyzes the
Net Express project file and its configuration settings, creates projects based on this information, imports the existing source code
into them, and sets the requisite project and file properties from the original
Net Express project. The majority of the existing applications will continue to run in
Visual COBOL without the need to change their code.
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
- Visual COBOL 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:
- 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.
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
Getting Started section under
Native COBOL Tutorials.
The IMTK enables you to create an interface between a legacy COBOL application running on an
ESI as a service, such as a Web service or Java service, and a non-COBOL client, such as a Web service client or a JSP client.
The interface you create is called a
service interface. In your service interface, you can expose as much or as little of the original legacy application functionality as you choose.
Because legacy 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 create the following types of service interfaces for COBOL programs:
- Java Interface
- Web Service from WSDL
- Web Service from request-response JSON schemas
- RESTful Web Service from JSON schema
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 section in the
Additional Software Requirements on Windows topic.
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 a
Visual COBOL project
- Defining the details of the service interface using the
Interface Mapper
- Deploying the legacy application and service interface to your
enterprise server instance
- Generating one or more clients to access the service running on the
enterprise server instance
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