Chapter 2: Features

This chapter introduces you to the main features of reUZE Developer.

Introduction

reUZE Developer provides a tool suite that enables you to migrate business applications to lower cost environments. You can also use the product to maintain, improve and modernize the migrated application.

reUZE Developer supports many mainframe technologies, such as CICS, JCL, and DB2. This means that the core online and batch application logic can be migrated and reused with minimal modification on any of these new environments.

The product also includes the development and testing tools you need to modernize the migrated applications, to exploit existing interfaces and extend them to a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), through .NET, Web services or J2EE.

The reUZE Developer suite supports the entire development life cycle from analysis to test, while its companion product, reUZE Server, supports the deployment of the migrated application on the new production platform.

Develop and Build within Visual Studio

You use Microsoft Visual Studio and its integrated development environment (IDE) to edit, compile and debug the COBOL applications. The IDE provides all the functionality to manage projects and debug applications.

You can develop applications that have been migrated from the mainframe and that use mainframe technologies like CICS, and JCL. These compile to native (Micro Focus) COBOL code, as .exe or .dll, and execute in conjunction with the reUZE Server run-time system.

You can also develop COBOL applications as .NET managed code. .NET managed COBOL programs compile to Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL), and they execute in conjunction with the Microsoft Common Language run-time system (CLR), just like programs in other .NET languages, such as C#.

Development support is provided for:

Projects — with templates supplied for mainframe applications, console applications, class libraries and more
Editing — with syntax colorization, background parsing and, for .NET managed code Intellisense
Debugging code — with the usual features such as stepping, breakpoints, watch windows and querying execution environments
Mainframe applications — for editing, compiling and debugging CICS programs, and JCL applications

Test on reUZE Server

The reUZE Server run-time environment is included within the development product to enable you to perform extensive unit testing. It provides a local run-time environment for the migrated application that supports the execution of COBOL/CICS applications, JCL procedures and the COBOL programs or utilities they call.

You can use the monitoring and administration tools to start and stop instances of the reUZE Server environment and to administer the local configuration. These tools enable you to interact with a running reUZE Server environment in a similar way to a mainframe console. They also provide real-time reporting on the current status of any instance of reUZE Server for debugging and diagnostics purposes.

Modernization and Integration

Terminal Emulator User Interfaces and Modernization

reUZE Developer includes the Micro Focus RUMBA terminal emulator to enable connectivity from Windows desktops to virtually any host system. This includes connectivity to migrated 3270 based applications executing within reUZE Server.

Integration with Other Systems

reUZE Developer and reUZE Server support CICS Inter-System Communication (ISC). This enables you to develop and test the appropriate interfaces to integrate CICS transactions running off the mainframe with other CICS transactions running on the mainframe.

reUZE Server includes technology that can be deployed on the mainframe to handle the conversion between TCP/IP protocol stacks on Windows and the SNA/LU6.2 protocol stack on the mainframe.