Overview of application development in Eclipse

Visual COBOL is a contemporary development suite for Eclipse that allows mainframe developers to maintain, develop and modernize mainframe applications regardless of whether these are to be deployed back on the mainframe or onto alternative platforms.

When you develop applications in Eclipse, you use Eclipse features such as perspectives and views, as well as background checking of syntax and build, debug and run configurations. Like in other Micro Focus products, you use specific project types, familiar functionality for editing and debugging, and comprehensive help.

You can develop applications locally where source code and the Eclipse IDE are hosted on your client machine or, remotely, where you use a remote server to host your source code and use the Eclipse IDE on your local machine as the development interface.

The features of this development environment include:

Perspectives to show the appropriate panes and views in the IDE such as the COBOL and Debug perspectives.
Editing that supports:
- Background parse for syntax checking
- Code templates by pressing ctrl space
- Program outline view
- Copybook Dependency view
- Code completion
- Collapse/expand of copybooks and tagged lines
- Code colorization
Project handling, such as:
- Automatic building
- Dependency checking
- ANT as the engine
- Build Precedence ordering for directories
- SQL directive support
- Multiple build configurations
Debug configurations, which you can reuse for different debugging scenarios. For example, you can have one configuration for debugging a local application and one for a remote application. These include:
- Attach to local process
- Core dump
- Enterprise Server service debugging
- Remote application (including 64bit)
- Wait for application
- Attach to a remote running application. This allows you to attach a debugger to an already running remote COBOL application
- Wait for attachment. This process starts a debugger and waits for a remote COBOL application to attach
Debugging using features such as:
- Breakpoints
- Expressions view
- Stack trace
- Stepping
- Variables view
- Watchpoints

Tutorials

There are a number of tutorials that guide you through creating COBOL applications of various sorts using the Eclipse IDE. The source files for some of the tutorials are installed in subfolders of the $COBDIR/demo folder by default.

To complete the remote mainframe development tutorial you must download the supporting files from the Micro Focus Web site at http://supportline.microfocus.com/examplesandutilities/zEntTutorial.aspx.