Large Projects and Remote Development

Micro Focus has the following additional recommendations when you are developing applications with a large code base stored on a remote machine.

Choose the RSE connection type

Micro Focus recommends that you use RSE instead of NFS/Samba as the connection type. This is because NFS/Samba connections, which use a network drive, are substantially slower.

Note: Note that remote mainframe subsystem projects which need to build BMS files do not support the RSE connection type.

If your projects already use the NFS/Samba connection, you can change this to RSE to help improve the performance. To access the connection properties:

  1. Right-click your remote project in COBOL Explorer and click Remote Settings.
  2. See To change the connection type of a remote project for more details.

Avoid using Determine Directives

Avoid using the Determine Directives command to scan your sources and set Compiler directives on files, when the source code is located on a remote machine. This is because directives scanning can be slow over a remote connection.

Copying files to the remote machine

Avoid using Eclipse to copy (using drag and drop or simply copying) a large number of files from your local machine to the remote one. This operation in the IDE could take a long time. Use a tool such as RCP or FTP to do this and then add your sources to the remote project.

You can, however, use the Remote System Explorer view that has a built-in SFTP functionality.

Use Source Control Management

To improve the performance, Micro Focus recommends that you store and use the source files from a Source Control Management (SCM) system and not access them over a remote connection.

You check out the sources on your local machine and work with local projects avoiding any downtime created by the remote connection. You then check the changed sources back into the SCM. To deploy the changes to the remote machine you update the SCM sandbox.