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Follow UsBANGALORE, INDIA: Remember how COBOL programs were written in the past? Well, it was real pain as the interface was not as user-friendly as the new IDEs that are available for various languages. However, at a later stage, the re-engineering process began for COBOL because development on the language had achieved its saturation.
The optimization of the code began to gain traction which made it even more difficult for developers to work on. Also debugging the application on a mainframe was costlier and there was need for a solution.
The Microfocus Mainframe Express Enterprise Edition provides mainframe development environment for developers with the added benefit of reduced costs and risks. Today, organizations are looking at building and deploying an application in a short period of time.
Also, as rewriting the application for a new platform is much costlier, this solution helps in reusing the existing application code, skills and assets in a simple and cost effective way. This also helps you to deliver the application over multiple channels, for example online. Take an example of a typical banking environment where the backend is running on legacy systems. And suppose they want to introduce a new featue that helps users to know their loan balance.
For this, they had to build applications in an interface that was not graphical, and then for testing they used mainframes which made the task costlier. Executing the application on a mainframe is far costlier than executing on workstations as mainframes charge on MIPS.
Using this tool, one can create or optimize applications and run mainframe-based applications with ease as there is inbuilt emulator for mainframes. The emulators provided with this application are CICS, IMS, DB2 and Assembler. Also, after this application has been deployed, exporting a program to a mainframe is as simple as drag and drop.
One of the major drawbacks with legacy applications is that they are not documented well. This is a real pain as there would be number of modifications done to an application to optimize it and make it suitable for business. Now the challenge here is that if someone has to go to through the code, as would be the case if they want to redeploy the application as a web service or .NET object, then the task becomes really difficult.
To overcome this challenge, MFEEE provides a very easy and effective environment to take up the legacy application and analyze or re-engineer it. It provides full support for all phases of a typical mainframe application such as design and generation, through analysis, development, compilation, debugging, testing and deployment, which makes the tasks easy as developers don't need to switch workstations for each phase.
The analysis tool provided by MFEEE has a wide variety of capabilities; for example, if there is a variable and you want to know its occurrence in the program, you can do so with a couple of clicks. Also you can search for the occurrence of a macro in an application. The best feature is the automatic graphical representation of the application structure which helps developers to know how an application works.
That is, what program is being called and by whom. In addition, it has the ability to capture lines of code, variable definitions, entire files, etc for better management of a program. This detail can also be shared with other members for team-oriented activity. Apart from these, context-sensitive information about different variables, files and other key information are shown in an application suggestion window for developers.
MFEEE provides you a very easy UI which lists all programs, dependencies, etc in the same window. | In the same window, you can edit the program and run. This makes debugging easier for developers. |
Like any other IDE, you will find debugging features as well. For example, it allows a developer to see step-by-step execution of a program. It also allows you to examine the data item and change it during the execution of the program. Apart from these, it provides you the ability to debug native COBOL or S-COBOL according to your preference. MFEEE also includes component generation technology with the help of which you can capture complete legacy applications running on the mainframe and reuse them as a component of Java Beans, EJB, .NET, XML, web services, etc without writing a single object from scratch. The MFEEE has integrated support for JCL and REXX which enables the developer to execute complete batch jobs on the workstation. As it has in-built REXX and CLIST engines, this enables developers to execute the mainframe REXX and CLIST commands within the MFEEE IDE.
For testing an application, this IDE provides a mainfram emulator to run all programs and hence saves on time and costs. |
Bottomline: COBOL programmers have been waiting since long for the innovative features provided by this IDE. Now that they have one, there should be little room to complain about.