Working with IDz Perspectives

Rational Developer for z Systems provides two workbench perspectives: the z/OS Projects perspective (for development and debugging work with IDz projects) and the Remote Systems perspective (for connecting to one or more remote z/OS systems and working with personal development libraries on those systems). Neither perspective is supplied with the open-source version of the Eclipse Workbench.

Although the main perspective for working with ChangeMan ZMF from the workbench is the new Serena perspective, developers of mainframe software will typically spend much of their time in one of these IDz perspectives. For their convenience, the ZMF for Eclipse plug-in duplicates certain ZMF-specific functions in the contextual menu for individual components in the z/OS Projects navigation view.

Otherwise, the integration between ChangeMan ZMF and IDz is passive rather than active. Any personal development library on the mainframe is visible to IDz without special action on the part of the ZMF for Eclipse plug-in. ZMF-specific functions involving these libraries are managed from the Serena perspective independently of IDz. But native IDz functionality is used to associate these development libraries with IDz projects. Once part of an IDz project, the same development libraries that rely on ZMF for change control and build management can also take advantage of IDz’s rich suite of development and debugging tools for mainframe applications.