Welcome to the AcuBench® integrated development environment for COBOL from Micro Focus. AcuBench is a member of the extend®
family of interoperability solutions. AcuBench extends and enhances the ACUCOBOL-GT® development system with a powerful suite
of graphical tools for data, program, interface, and report design. With AcuBench you can develop and maintain your COBOL
applications in a developer friendly Microsoft Windows environment and deploy your applications on any of the more than 600
platforms supported by Micro Focus.
Some of AcuBench's major features include:
- a single, integrated user interface
- a powerful and flexible workspace, project, program development model
- extensive automated code generation capabilities that simplify the development of screens, reports, Working-Storage and Linkage
section items, FDs and SELECTs, and other key program areas
- specialized designers and editors for creating and maintaining:
- data layout definitions (file descriptors)
- data set associations
- event procedures
- Working-Storage items
- Linkage section items
- run-time configuration files
- support for the ACUCOBOL-GT Thin Client technology, which lets you display your server-based application on graphical display
hosts
- an integrated source level debugger
- graphical interfaces to ACUCOBOL-GT utilities
- support for many third-party version control systems
- a graphical interface that lets you design HTML and plain-text reports
AcuBench includes key project management supports for:
- concurrent development of multiple projects
- multiple project configuration management
- multiple project and file level compilation settings (modes)
- project level run-time and environment settings
- automated inclusion of COBOL COPY files
- access to external programs and utilities
Key code development features include:
- user configurable, COBOL-sensitive source code editor
- automated code completion capabilities (prompts for completing some phrases and easy insertion of template code)
- paragraph, variable, COPY file, and constant lists
- quick access to COPY files
- ability to bookmark code for ease of navigation
- search functions to find strings either in a specified directory structure or within a set of AcuBench objects
Key screen development capabilities include:
- support for ActiveX controls
- graphical and character-based screen designers
- templates for graphical and character-based screens, plus the ability to create additional user-defined templates
- graphical and character screen import capabilities
- customizable control defaults and Property windows
- in-line editing of event and embedded procedures
Integrated User Interface
The workbench presents all of its primary capabilities in an integrated main application window. This user-configurable window
contains several interior windows for viewing projects; working with data; working with programs and their components, including
screens and reports; and for monitoring several types of system output (compilation messages, version control actions, search
results, and more). There are also special windows for coding embedded procedures and working with the integrated debugger.
You can control the visibility, size, and placement of all interior windows and toolbars.
Project-centered Application Development
A project model is used to support AcuBench application development. Each element of a COBOL application, large or small,
is identified, added to, and tracked by AcuBench as a project. As a result, applications enjoy a standard structure that makes
them easier to manage and maintain. This architecture allows AcuBench to handle many aspects of application development for
you. For example, when you direct AcuBench to build (compile) a project, AcuBench automatically determines which elements
of the project must be recompiled to make the project current.
Note: Unless otherwise indicated, the references to Windows in this manual denote the following 32-bit versions of the Windows operating systems: Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows
NT 4.0 or later, Windows 2000, Windows 2003, and the following 64-bit versions of the Windows operating systems: Windows Server
2003 and 2008 x64, Vista x64. In those instances where it is necessary to make a distinction among the individual versions
of those operating systems, we refer to them by their specific version numbers (such as Windows 2000 and Windows NT 4.0).