Today's product release improves installation/usage experience, furthers unified DevOps processes

Based on your feedback we're introducing several significant changes to Rocket Open AppDev for Z today. While you can read the full press release here, users of the forum will be familiar with the topics and improvements listed below:

• Inclusion of IBM Python with full compatibility between Rocket z/OS ports to reduce administrative overhead
• Streamlined installation and the choice to use SMP/E or conda for deployments
• An update to the latest version of Bash – V5.1
• An updated Perl port providing seamless and transparent ASCII EBCDIC conversion

What do you think of these improvements? I'd love to learn how you plan to take advantage of them or what problems they solve. We've already seen hundreds of downloads so I'm sure you have feedback for me!

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Peter Fandel
Sr. Director, Product Management
Rocket Software
------------------------------

Hi,

"installation and the choice to use SMP/E"
really great news!

conda was a wrong turn! We stopped all efforts to install opentools with conda. It was a huge mess.
And I don't mean the conversation issues. Its the way conda restricts the deployments in a full automated mainframe environment. You (back)ported "OPEN" problems on a centralized plattform, which solved this issues 30years ago.

What says your schedule? When is it ga?

kind regards,
Björn

------------------------------
Björn Schanz
Sysprog
R + V Allgemeine Versicherung AG
Wiesbaden DE
------------------------------

Hi,

"installation and the choice to use SMP/E"
really great news!

conda was a wrong turn! We stopped all efforts to install opentools with conda. It was a huge mess.
And I don't mean the conversation issues. Its the way conda restricts the deployments in a full automated mainframe environment. You (back)ported "OPEN" problems on a centralized plattform, which solved this issues 30years ago.

What says your schedule? When is it ga?

kind regards,
Björn

------------------------------
Björn Schanz
Sysprog
R + V Allgemeine Versicherung AG
Wiesbaden DE
------------------------------

I agree with Bjorn -- all hail SMPE.   I have hope again.

You can search this community to see all of the trials and tribulations I had with miniconda.    

I have worked with the Rocket ported tools for many years.  It saddened me to see the simple 'plug-and-play'  method turn into the conda overhead managed monster.
Do not get me wrong,  if your were born and raised in the unix development world, conda is just another day at the office.   But introducing a tool THAT different to a tried and true process like SMPE is a major hurdle to clean installs.
My only worry is that someone unfamiliar with SMPE designed the HOW Rocket will use SMPE.   Other major software vendors in the past have tried to provide 'tools' and 'assistance' to shelter the customer from the 'complications' of SMPE.    RECEIVE-APPLY-ACCEPT has been part of my job for 30 years and works naturally for me.  It may not be sexy and devops, but it gets the job done just fine.

Here's hoping for a better tomorrow.   And installs that do not require weeks of learning and custom setups and file tagging and only bash shells and ........   I have to stop now before I melt down.

------------------------------
Tom Longfellow
Senior Systems Programmer
Maryland Judicial Information Systems (JIS)
Annapolis MD US
------------------------------

I agree with Bjorn -- all hail SMPE.   I have hope again.

You can search this community to see all of the trials and tribulations I had with miniconda.    

I have worked with the Rocket ported tools for many years.  It saddened me to see the simple 'plug-and-play'  method turn into the conda overhead managed monster.
Do not get me wrong,  if your were born and raised in the unix development world, conda is just another day at the office.   But introducing a tool THAT different to a tried and true process like SMPE is a major hurdle to clean installs.
My only worry is that someone unfamiliar with SMPE designed the HOW Rocket will use SMPE.   Other major software vendors in the past have tried to provide 'tools' and 'assistance' to shelter the customer from the 'complications' of SMPE.    RECEIVE-APPLY-ACCEPT has been part of my job for 30 years and works naturally for me.  It may not be sexy and devops, but it gets the job done just fine.

Here's hoping for a better tomorrow.   And installs that do not require weeks of learning and custom setups and file tagging and only bash shells and ........   I have to stop now before I melt down.

------------------------------
Tom Longfellow
Senior Systems Programmer
Maryland Judicial Information Systems (JIS)
Annapolis MD US
------------------------------

Hi Tom,

don't get me wrong. I'm not a SMPE hardcore fanatic. SMPE  didn't age well. IBM was lazy the last decade. SMPE was on V3.6 for years.

Specially dealing with HFS has a lot of painpoints. The BPXCOPY utility are still not able to tag files with CCSIDs. Heard about a PTF should deliver this feature, but there is no paramater for ++HFS to set a tag on the MCS statement side.

I'm expecting Rocket will deliver a ++HFS pax/blob and unpax it by executing a ++shellscript. As far as I know this is the only way to tag ascii enhanced conform text files in a smpe managed filesystem.

But this would solve my problem with rocket's own miniconda install script. It writes absolute pathes hardcoded in thousand of files. This makes imposible to deliver the installed packe to other systems or sysres volumes. Tried to aid this by cleaning pathes with a sed-script... but with no luck.

Kind regards,
Björn

------------------------------
Björn Schanz
Sysprog
R + V Allgemeine Versicherung AG
Wiesbaden DE
------------------------------

Hi Tom,

don't get me wrong. I'm not a SMPE hardcore fanatic. SMPE  didn't age well. IBM was lazy the last decade. SMPE was on V3.6 for years.

Specially dealing with HFS has a lot of painpoints. The BPXCOPY utility are still not able to tag files with CCSIDs. Heard about a PTF should deliver this feature, but there is no paramater for ++HFS to set a tag on the MCS statement side.

I'm expecting Rocket will deliver a ++HFS pax/blob and unpax it by executing a ++shellscript. As far as I know this is the only way to tag ascii enhanced conform text files in a smpe managed filesystem.

But this would solve my problem with rocket's own miniconda install script. It writes absolute pathes hardcoded in thousand of files. This makes imposible to deliver the installed packe to other systems or sysres volumes. Tried to aid this by cleaning pathes with a sed-script... but with no luck.

Kind regards,
Björn

------------------------------
Björn Schanz
Sysprog
R + V Allgemeine Versicherung AG
Wiesbaden DE
------------------------------

Agreed.
I would not call myself a hardcore SMPE fanatic, but it is  the mainframe installation tool of choice for a very long.  You have to go with the tools you are given.

I also agree that they do have deficiencies in their Unix file handling system.  It has never fully supported all the many file tagging options.   I can remember when it was worse as HFS (and eventually)  ZFS file systems were introduced.   Things have improved but can still be a bit of a burden.

The entire issue of tagging and auto-convert character sets has been a recurring problem for me lately.   Just another annoyance when trying to support many character sets under the same operating system. (unix OR z/os OR windows, etc)

------------------------------
Tom Longfellow
Senior Systems Programmer
Maryland Judicial Information Systems (JIS)
Annapolis MD US
------------------------------

Hi,

"installation and the choice to use SMP/E"
really great news!

conda was a wrong turn! We stopped all efforts to install opentools with conda. It was a huge mess.
And I don't mean the conversation issues. Its the way conda restricts the deployments in a full automated mainframe environment. You (back)ported "OPEN" problems on a centralized plattform, which solved this issues 30years ago.

What says your schedule? When is it ga?

kind regards,
Björn

------------------------------
Björn Schanz
Sysprog
R + V Allgemeine Versicherung AG
Wiesbaden DE
------------------------------

Hi Björn ,
The SMP/E download is already available however note that the SMP/E option is only available to customers on paid support.
We are very happy this option meets an important user need.
Regards,
-Peter

------------------------------
Peter Fandel
Sr. Director, Product Management
Rocket Software
------------------------------