New Plugin Supports ADSplus for IBM and Eclipse

IBM and Delta are teaming-up to develop a plugin for IBM’s WebSphere Developer for zSeries (WD4z) to support Delta’s ADSplus application generator. The goal is to have direct, integrated support for ADSplus, the development tool from Delta for generative application development.

IBM WebSphere Developer for zSeries is a PC-based development workbench based on the Eclipse extensible development platform. ADSplus is Delta’s widely used generator system for classic application development. It is specialised for quickly and easily creating scalable and reliable platform-independent COBOL and PL/1 applications.

Development work on the new ADSplus plugin is already underway. The first version is currently scheduled for release during Summer 2006.

PC-Based Development for IBM System z Mainframes

Many of Delta’s largest customers develop on, and deploy for, IBM’s System z mainframe, taking advantage of the scalability, reliability and security of this leading mainframe platform to deploy their mission critical ADSplus applications with their massive transactional and batch workloads.

While the IBM System z mainframe is ideal as a high-performance deployment platform for production workloads, it can however be an expensive platform to use to support application development. It is not so much the hardware that is expensive, rather the system software and development products that can drive costs through the roof.

IBM recognises this challenge and has therefore been encouraging its mainframe customers to move application development from the host to more economical PC-based solutions. IBM’s standard solution for offloading development is IBM WebSphere Developer for zSeries.

IBM WebSphere Developer for zSeries is a PC-based development workbench based on the Eclipse open source extensible development platform.

IBM WebSphere Developer for zSeries extends Eclipse with integrated host communications, live parsing editors for COBOL and PL/1 and a diverse range of productivity tools to cover all tasks involved with developing, maintaining, supporting and deploying System z applications.

ADSplus Development in IBM WebSphere Developer for zSeries

The ADSplus plugin extends IBM WebSphere Developer for zSeries by adding new functionality for the ADSplus developer. The main element is an intelligent editing environment for working with ADSplus source code.

The planned features of the ADSplus plugin currently include:

• Chroma-coding and active parsing for macros, screens and the different program types.
• Interactive outliner showing program structures, as well as the macro call structure in generation listings.
• Highlighting of macro parameter usage.
• Code snippets (templates) for macros, processor calls and Delta SPP statements.
• Display of generation listing and documentation records.
• Calling the various ADSplus processors.
• Context sensitive help.

ADSplus Generation

The Delta Generator Engine for Microsoft Windows will be fully integrated into the IBM WebSphere Developer for zSeries process workflow so that the full “Edit – Generate – Compile” process is performed locally on the PC.

Back reference information from the generated source code automatically guides the developer to the exact point in the ADSplus source code that lead to the generation of that code. The back-references are also used to intelligently help the developer correct any compile errors.

The compiled object code is automatically moved to the IBM System z host from the PC by IBM WebSphere Developer for zSeries. Applications running on the host can be interactively debugged from the PC.

ADSplus Plugin for the Eclipse Development Platform

Delta is also planning to make available an ADSplus plugin for the standard Eclipse extensible development platform. This will build on the experiences gained from working with IBM on the ADSplus plugin for IBM WebSphere Developer for zSeries.

The ADSplus plugin for Eclipse is fully independent from the target platform and can be used to develop ADSplus applications for any target platform supported by ADSplus. It will not be dependent in any way on the installation or use of IBM System z and/or IBM WebSphere Developer for zSeries.

Further Information

If you would like further information about adding support for ADSplus development to IBM WebSphere Developer for zSeries or Eclipse then please contact your local sales representative.