Features Added in Visual COBOL 2.0

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 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.

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.

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