On 30/01/2021 6:42 am, Wayne Bickerdike wrote:
Necessity is the mother of invention. Glad someone invented ISPF edit macros. Others have a different vi(ew!)
It's going to take a lot more than a few ISPF edit macros to implement what's available in the new generation of mainframe IDEs Wayne! A couple of years back we attended the Z roadshow at IBM, Perth. They demoed IBM Wazi Developer which was impressive. It's a web based IDE that spins up docker containers in the cloud for workspaces. A few years back IBM acquired EZSource which is a suite of tools for deep code analysis of COBOL/PL1 legacy code. It builds a dependency graph of all the assets in an application. It can find dead code, logic errors. Modern editors like VS Code are implemented using language servers and the Language Server Protocol (LSP) [2] to run RPC calls on the back-end for code completion, context assist, linting etc. All of this fits into a devops pipeline. There were loads of young devs from Perths big bank that day who were using IBM developer for Z and they will jump right on Wazi. BW are transitioning to Git so we will lose a Proteus SCM customer and gain a Git customer.
Tooling like this is a necessity as the developers with deep knowledge of the system retire or drop off, which is happening now. Intelligent tooling and modern development practices are a must. The ISPF editor is not intelligent. I can't even write a customer syntax highlighter for shell scripts let alone Python, both of which are first class mainframe languages. Of course, most of the old timers that have used ISPF for 30+ years will stick to what they know and good luck to them.
Good news that you can get a VS Code based z/OS mainframe editor that supports COBOL, PL1 and HLASM for free [3]. If you're running Zowe it can integrate with the remote system explorer. I was involved in code reviews for some of the RSE work and it's a very neat implementation. All of the code is open source on Github. It's hard to justify stumping up hundreds of $$ for Slickedit or Ultraedit when you can get this for free!
[1] https://www.ibm.com/products/wazi-developer [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_Server_Protocol [3] https://ibm.github.io/zopeneditor-about/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
