MicroFocus Mainframe Express Enterprise Edition

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.

Re-engineering with MFEEE



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.