Eclipse and zEnterprise... The Innovation Combination

A suitably cheesey title for a blog I’m working on. You’ll see it soon enough on blog.microfocus.com but in the meantime here is a working draft. Quite like it because it references a product of ours but - I think - talks about it in a broader mainframe development context that makes sense.

But then I would say that. See what you think.

Eclipse and zEnterprise: the Innovation Combination

The rapid pace of change in IT is one of the biggest challenges confronting IT leaders in mainframe organizations. Recent innovative solutions supporting a changing IT landscape include a contemporary development framework called Eclipse and a ground-breaking flexible enterprise environment called zEnterprise. What are the advantages of using Eclipse and zEnterprise, and how can these enable organizations with maturing core systems to keep up, and embrace innovation?

Solving a familiar problem
One of the problems large development organizations face is a lack of communication between developers who know the original so-called “legacy” languages and those who are building other applications, using other languages on other environments. These two separate groups often use different tools, processes, skills and deadlines. The obvious solution to this problem is to use a development environment which caters for both communities.

Eclipse is the multi-language, industry standard Integrated Development Environment (IDE). It is used widely for developing applications in Java and a variety of other languages. Eclipse provides a familiar environment for developers used to modern usability and functionality, as it consists of the same tooling, functions and features as they are used to. It allows all languages to be “plugged” into its framework, so everyone can use the same tooling and environment, regardless of language choice. Eclipse promises to improve application development right across the enterprise.

Smart choice
IBM’s high performance mainframe, zEnterprise, offers a flexible choice of platforms enabling workload to be built and deployed according to a fit for purpose model. Customers can take advantage of the latest z/OS mainframe environment, or choose to exploit z/Linux, AIX and even Windows environments for certain tasks. Optimized processes and capacity will then allow for a better focus on developing new services to push growth and innovation. Offering a lower Total Cost of Ownership and faster performance, zEnterprise is a platform which makes the most business sense for many enterprises today.

Bringing it all together
As the IT world is providing innovative technology that sets to unify both development processes on the one hand (Eclipse) and provides effective platform consolidation options on the other (zEnterprise), customers are now looking to ensure these environments support the continuation of existing, core applications.

To solve this, the requirement is for an Eclipse-based solution to allow you to build core zEnterprise apps using the most prevalent and fit for purpose business language of all: COBOL.

Smarter teamwork
Micro Focus Enterprise Developer’s ability to work hand-in-hand with zEnterprise to bring both mature and new languages together under one roof directly addresses the problematic gap in developer skills, forming a strong bridge across all development teams.

The benefits of Enterprise Developer for the zEnterprise environment are numerous. It enables teams to develop directly on the mainframe through the Eclipse IDE. The reliance on the mainframe can be removed by editing compiling, debugging and running jobs with zero waiting time, directly in Windows. Mainframe-based application processes can be simply integrated into the Enterprise Developer Eclipse interface. Furthermore, Java programmers can become familiar with COBOL applications in a matter of hours, fostering closer collaboration and yielding higher quality, 40% faster delivery of robust, zEnterprise applications.

The innovation path
Enterprise Developer’s contemporary, robust development environment for zEnterprise, enables costs to be driven down, bottlenecks to be removed and innovation accelerated, enabling customers to build truly fit for purpose zEnterprise applications faster than ever before. It is this combination of strengths which may enable organizations with mature core systems to keep up with business demands and embrace innovation.

The latest update of Micro Focus Enterprise Developer for zEnterprise will be available in spring 2013. For more information see www.microfocus.com