Welcome to Revolve Enterprise Edition, the most productive tool for analyzing and maintaining your legacy applications. Revolve Enterprise Edition 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 source exploration tools.
To understand the architecture of the products within the whole Micro Focus Revolve Transformation Product Suite, see the chapter Understanding the Revolve Transformation Product Suite. This explains which features are contained within which product, and how this affects your use of the different products and options, if at all.
Revolve Enterprise Edition analyzes your legacy application to discover its structure; the files it uses; how and where data items are used; and many other details. It stores the results of 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.
In addition it contains tools enabling you to manage the maintenance of the application - whether as an individual programmer or as leader of a team - by applying rules you define to recognize, categorize and document items that need to be changed for source updates to be complete and consistent.
Revolve runs on Windows 98, Windows NT, Windows XP Professional 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 Enterprise Edition's Help menu.
Only Getting Started books are also supplied in printed form. This chapter gives a brief overview of Revolve Enterpise Edition, the next chapter gives an overview of the product architecture, and 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 Micro Focus software before.
In this release, we've 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 Enterprise Edition are:
The Revolve Enterprise Edition Desktop is the main window, with pulldown menus, through which you access the Revolve tools. Toolbars, popup menus, and various subwindows all help to make the desktop very fast to use. The Desktop is sometimes called the Integrated Development Environment (IDE).
A project is where Revolve keeps a note of 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 that you want to analyze.
A set of tools for analyzing 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 Micro Focus product Source Connect to use this functionality.
The three optional extensions provided enable Revolve to work with Assembler, PL/I or Unisys COBOL.
You use the analysis tools, with their detailed understanding of the COBOL language, to identify places in your application that are relevant to the update you're planning. These are called points of interest (POIs). The tools find points of interest such as:
You produce sets of potential points of interest by running the analysis tools. You then combine sets in various ways and run them through further tools, removing the points of interest that are not, after all, relevant to the planned update. In this way, you rapidly find code that actually needs modifying.
You can create your own tools, consisting of a sequence of tools and set manipulations that you have developed and want to use repeatedly. This is particularly useful in cases where identifying a particular type of item involves several passes through the analysis tools including set manipulation. Once you have created a composite tool, you can distribute it to others in your group for them to use.
You use the worksheet to record points of interest and any categories you assign to them, as well as any decisions or changes you make regarding them. This means that the worksheet documents the application analysis phase. From here, you can monitor progress and output a variety of reports as needed.
The Enterprise Edition features are metered on a line-of-code basis, which means that the code has to have been metered before you can process it through the analysis tools. Only one person needs to meter the code, and then everyone can process the code without further cost. The demonstration programs are already metered, so all you need to do is to point to the file that confirms that the code has been metered. This file is called the metering control file.
Several add-ons are available for use with Revolve Enterprise Edition. They add features for specific purposes:
To identify the business logic in your enterprise applications and separate it into reusable modules.
To help update an application so that it handles the common European currency, the Euro.
Some non-Micro Focus software is supplied under license with Revolve Enterprise Edition:
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Adobe Acrobat Reader enables you to read and print online books in Adobe's Portable Document Format. Supplied are the Adobe Acrobat Reader and a PDF copy 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.
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