Micro Focus

What’s New Summary For Mainframe Express® 3.0

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Mainframe Express® Enterprise Edition

Mainframe Express® 3.0 includes a wide range of new and enhanced features focused on productivity, manageability and mainframe compatibility. Many of the highlights are outlined in this document. A new product called Mainframe Express® Enterprise Edition has also been introduced and is described later in this document.

For more detailed information, please refer to the product documentation or the Micro Focus website at www.microfocus.com/products/mfeee.

Mainframe Compatibility

Mainframe compatibility has been updated and enhanced across several areas:

  • Enterprise COBOL for z/OS
  • DB2
  • IMS
  • CICS
  • Assembler
  • JCL         

Test Coverage Reporting

The new Test Coverage utility enables you to track which COBOL code has been executed during testing. Features include:

  • HTML or plain text reporting
  • Option to collate results over a series of test runs
  • Illustration of percentage of code covered during testing

Editing Enhancements

The editors have been enhanced in several areas including many new features:

  • New ISPF-like source editing interface
  • Mainframe-style renumbering
  • Autocomplete
  • SQL creation wizard
  • Raw Hex edit for data files
  • New cut and paste facilities for data files         

Usability Improvements

Several enhancements to aid usability have been made including:

  • New IDE indicators to assist with navigation
  • Improvements to dockable windows
  • Drag and drop of source files from ‘My Mainframe’
  • Viewing of files that have not been added to a project
  • Improved documentation and new audio visual tutorials

Administration and Implementation

A number of key enhancements have been made to improve the manageability and ease of administration of Mainframe Express:

· Automated synchronization with mainframe source components

· Automatic Fixpack installation utility

· Usage Logging facility

· Long filename Support

· License Management improvements

· SQL Option configuration improvements

· New Quick Build option

· New JCL User Exits

· New precompiler support for COBOL and BMS

· Entry Point Mapping improvements

· More ‘portable’ projects

· Mainframe-style dataset names

· Workgrouping search paths for data files

· New import tool for IMS transaction definitions

· New facility to perform bulk importing and cataloging of mainframe data files

· New support for UNLOAD/RELOAD of DB2 tables from JCL


What’s New in Mainframe Express® Enterprise Edition

Introduction

Mainframe Express® Enterprise Editionis a brand new unified environment for mainframe development from Micro Focus. Available today, it is available as an upgrade to existing MFE, APS, AppMaster Builder and COBOL Workbench customers. Mainframe Express® Enterprise Edition combines the mainframe application development and testing capabilities of Mainframe Express®, with additional powerful analysis, application generation and Web services capabilities into a single integrated product. In addition to the features described in the previous section, Mainframe Express Enterprise Edition includes the following capabilities.

Analysis Option

Customers with Mainframe Express® Enterprise Edition will benefit from new analysis capabilities available directly from within the Mainframe Express® IDE (Integrated Development Environment). For programmer-level analysis tasks, it will no longer be necessary to launch a separate product or tool. Instead, the following functions will be available with just a few clicks of the mouse:

  • Impact Analysis and query tools
  • COBOL outline view for easy code navigation
  • Graphical Flowcharts and System Diagrams
  • Worksets         

Application Generation

Mainframe Express® Enterprise Edition allows very fast creation of whole applications (such as IMS and CICS transactions and batch systems) including generation of supporting infrastructure items such as screen maps and database copybooks. The process is automated and can be carried out with a minimum of coding using a point and click approach. The resultant application is a pure mainframe COBOL application that is easy to debug and understand, with no proprietary runtime components required for deployment into production.

The application generation capability includes:

  • Full impact analysis capability
  • 100% compatibility with predecessor technologies (i.e. APS and AppMaster Builder)
  • Seamless integration with MFE compiler and debugger
  • 100% native source code generation
  • Capabilities to debug S-COBOL         

Component Generation

With Mainframe Express Enterprise Edition you can capture complete application business processes and automatically generate reusable, industry-standard components in the form of JavaBeans, EJBs, .NET, and XML. No re-coding or re-training is necessary.