On 2014-01-14 13:28, Tony Thigpen wrote:
(Cross-posted VSE-L, VMESA-L, Assembler-List)
Just received my Enterprise Tech Update and it had an item about IDEs
for the mainframe:
* Tech Talk: Eclipse — Welcome to the Future of Mainframe Development by
Jim Liebert. Eclipse has come to the mainframe and is likely to change
the way programmers accomplish work for years to come.
http://entsys.me/1n1qk
I have used Eclipse in the past. (Took a few Web Development classes at
the local college.) But, I never looked at it from a "Mainframe
Development" point of view.
I am currently doing all my assembler development (mainly VSE) on a pc
using the Dignus assembler, then transporting the objects to be linked
on VSE.
I would like to get some feedback from anyone who uses an IDE for
mainframe development, specifically for COBOL and Assembler coding.
For example:
How are you handling the change from a 3270 style editor to a pc style
editor? I currently edit my pc stored mainframe assembler code using
XTHE (The Hessling Editor) because it works like z/VM's Xedit. Every
time I have attempted to use a PC based editor, it just does not seem to
have the flexibility I find with Xedit. Especially, the ability to use
home-grown prefix-area macros. Also, column positions are so important
to COBOL and Assembler and it seems that most pc editors are designed
for free-form source like C or java.
Have you found decent IDE plug-ins for your languages?
Is the time right for moving to a pc based IDE for mainframe development?
Tony Thigpen
Brave question...prepare for a religious onslaught! ;)
Personally, I don't think many of the benefits of an IDE are as
applicable to Assembler as they to other languages. For languages such
as C++ and Java, an IDE can do extensive lookups of method and property
names, provide auto-completion of names that are often long, catch
syntax errors on the fly, etc. There simply isn't as much of all that in
Assembler.
We develop one of our components cross-platform on a PC using Dignus.
However, this component is largely C and C++. I use jEdit as an editor
and make to do the builds. Like you, we send the object modules to the
mainframe and link edit there. Most of the Assembler code for the
component is kept on z/OS.
You will likely get a different opinion from each person that responds.
Personally, I would rather use ISPF than anything else for Assembler and
JCL, but I would rather use almost anything but ISPF for many other
things, like C, C++, Java, HTML, PHP, etc.
--
Regards, Gord Tomlin
Action Software International
(a division of Mazda Computer Corporation)
Tel: (905) 470-7113, Fax: (905) 470-6507
