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Welcome to Revolve, the most productive tool for analysing your legacy applications to ease and speed up the task of mantaining them. It reduces the cost and complexity of tasks ranging from everyday bug fixes to large-scale system refurbishment, by providing programmers with powerful inventory analysis features and comprehensive exploration tools.
Revolve analyses your legacy application to discover its structure, the files it uses, how and where data items are used, and many other details, and stores this analysis in a database, which you can interrogate through many different tools to produce diagrams, reports, and so on, to help you understand the application.
Revolve runs on Windows 95 and its successors such as Windows 98, and on Windows NT and Windows 2000. In this book, we simply say "Windows" to mean any of these operating systems.
All the documentation is online. You get to it from the Windows Start menu, or from Revolve's Help menu.
Only this Getting Started book is also supplied in printed form. This chapter gives a brief overview of Revolve, and the next chapter gives brief notes on installing. The rest of this book is a set of tutorials to help you get started quickly.
We assume you're familiar with COBOL, CICS and the Windows operating system you're using, but that you've never seen Revolve or any other MERANT software before.
We've also introduced a new way for you to send us comments about the documentation quickly and easily, from within the online books. To read about it, see the appendix Send Us Comments.
The major parts of Revolve are:
The Revolve Desktop is the main window, with pulldown menus, through which you access the Revolve tools. Toolbars, popup menus, and split windows all help to make the Desktop very fast to use. It is sometimes called the Integrated Development Environment (IDE).
A project describes all the files in your application, their types, and how they are related. A project is very easy to create, and makes any processing of the application extremely quick and easy. You create a project for each application.
A set of tools for analysing source code. For example, you can locate discrepancies or targets, measure the complexity of your project, locate impacts, create coding tasks, and edit source code.
A set of browsers to supply you with information about your project components. For example, you can find where programs are called, examine copybooks, and view screens. Some browsers are for language-specific project components, like CICS, DMS, and JCL.
SourceConnect enables you to refer to files on a mainframe from your workstation, just as if the files were on a local or network drive. You need the separate MERANT product SourceConnect to utilize this functionality.
The three optional extensions provided enable Revolve to work with Assembler, PL/I or Unisys COBOL.
Some non-MERANT software is supplied under license with Revolve:
Microsoft Internet Explorer is a popular Web browser. You need a Web browser to read the Revolve online books. If you already have a Web browser installed, you can continue to use that.
Adobe Acrobat Reader enables you to read and print online books in the format supported by Adobe Acrobat. Supplied are the Adobe Acrobat Reader and a copy in Adobe Acrobat form of each online book, from which you can print the whole book in one operation. You are authorized to print one copy of each book for your own personal use.
Copyright © 2000 MERANT International Limited. All rights reserved.
This document and the proprietary marks and names
used herein are protected by international law.
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