Introduction
Eclipse is created by an Open Source community and is used in several different areas, e.g. as a development environment for Java or Android applications. Eclipse roots go back to 2001.
Most people know Eclipse as an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Java. Today it is the leading development environment for Java with a market share of approximately 65%.
Eclipse provides an architecture which can be extended with additional functionality. Several Open Source projects and companies (including Micro Focus) have extended Eclipse with additional components.
Micro Focus has extensively expanded this functionality to provide an Eclipse development environment for COBOL applications. This also enables the integration of Mainframe Programming with the JAVA community.
This chapter introduces the basic features of the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE).
This working environment integrates all the tools needed for writing, editing, compiling, debugging and testing Mainframe programs.
Pre-configured application
In order to make your experience more enjoyable, we are providing a pre-configured application that will later be taking you through various steps which will allow you to create your own Eclipse application development environment and later apply the knowledge to your own projects.
We will use this application for illustrating various features.
This application can be downloaded from here, and it is a self-extracting compressed file. You will need to execute this supplied file, which is named MFETDUSER.exe.
Make sure you set the destination folder to be C:\\
It will create a number of folders on your C:\\ drive with the root folder name MFETDUSER.
The sources for this application have been downloaded from the Mainframe.
All the data files are EBCDIC coded data files (although –EBCDIC or ASCII files are equally acceptable).
Folder Contents
Most of the folder contents are obvious by their naming but the following is a list for reference:
|
Folder name |
Use |
|
Projects\\Eclipse |
Location for storing your Eclipse Projects. |
|
Projects\\Studio |
Location for storing your Visual Studio Projects. (If you are using the Visual Studio version of Enterprise Developer) |
|
Sources\\BMS |
Contains just one Basic Map set. |
|
Sources\\cbl |
Contains 9 Cobol programs. |
|
Sources\\copybook |
Contains the copybooks required by the Cobol programs. (Some of these will be generated form the BMS during the class) |
|
Sources\\jcl |
Contains 2 simple job files. |
|
System\\catalog |
Your Catalog is stored here. |
|
System\\catalog\\ctlcards |
Contains a simple control card. |
|
System\\catalog\\data |
Your data files will be stored here. |
|
System\\catalog\\prc |
Contains a number of proc files. |
|
System\\DATA |
Contains printer output (we will not be using) |
|
System\\Loadlib |
This will contain the executable files once the application is built. |
|
System\\Logs |
This will contain various log files indicating the progress of your application execution. |
|
System\\RDEF |
Contains some resource definition data for CICS – this has been exported from the Mainframe and converted into a suitable form for the Workstation. |
|
System\\sysloadlib |
The application contains around 70 COBOL programs (in executable form only). All the executable files for these programs are here. As we build the project, we will only be building the 9 Cobol programs in the cbl folder shown above. |
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