Features Added in Visual COBOL 2.0

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:
  • 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.

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 Visual COBOL 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 a Visual COBOL 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

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
Parent topic: New Features