Rational Developer for System z

Transitioning from 3270 ISPF to Rational Developer for System z

About this guide

The objective of this guide is to help experienced ISPF users transition to using Rational® Developer for System z® as a development platform. It explains some of the key concepts, the different artifacts, and how these are related to each other. It also explains how some of the routine tasks performed on ISPF can be performed on Rational Developer for System z. The guide concludes with an explanation of the Eclipse Help feature.

Navigating Rational Developer for System z

One of the first differences you might notice between Rational Developer for System z and ISPF is how you navigate the product: You navigate ISPF by using the keyboard to type on panels and in the command line. In Rational Developer for System z you use a mouse to select menu items, buttons, and items from lists and tables and the keyboard for typing text.
Tip: Rational Developer for System z provides many keyboard shortcuts for menu items and window functions. Look for keyboard shortcuts on menus. After you become more familiar with Rational Developer for System z you might find that you can rely less on the mouse and use the keyboard more for accomplishing tasks:
Pop-up menu showing keyboard shortcuts for menu items
Rational Developer for System z uses a graphical user interface called an integrated development environment or IDE. The Rational Developer for System z IDE is often called the z/OS® integrated development environment or zIDE because it provides access to z/OS resources and functions through its IDE. The IDE consists of the following commonly used elements:
  • A workspace is the top-level workstation folder in which information about all of the resources you work with in Rational Developer for System z is stored. It contains local z/OS projects and files as well as information about your remote system connections and your development preferences and settings.
  • Perspectives are collections of tools that are frequently used together to accomplish a set of tasks. Some examples of Rational Developer for System z perspectives include the z/OS Projects perspective, which provides tools for accessing remote systems, creating projects, and submitting builds; the Data perspective, which provides tools for accessing and working with databases, and the Enterprise Service Tools perspective, which provides tools for enabling CICS® and IMS™ applications to participate in service-oriented architecture.

    You can think of a perspective as a graphical way of organizing functions.

  • Views are the individual tools that make up a perspective. Each view provides a different function or a different way of accessing (or viewing) the resources you are working with. The z/OS Projects perspective, for example, provides a Remote Systems view for connecting to remote z/OS systems, a z/OS Projects view for creating and building projects, and a Property Group Manager view for defining project build properties.

    You can think of views as roughly equivalent to an ISPF panel and ISPF itself as equivalent to a perspective.

  • Menus contain specific actions that you can perform in the zIDE. Most views provide pop-up menus, which you access by positioning the mouse pointer in the view and pressing the right button.
  • Windows provide places to type information, select items from lists, and click buttons to complete actions. Most zIDE windows open in response to selecting an item from a menu.
Perspectives, views, menus, and windows in Rational Developer for System z

Understanding the Rational Developer for System z architecture

Rational Developer for System z has a remote system component and a workstation client component. The remote system component is typically installed by a site's system programmer and is “transparent” to application programmers. For the remainder of this guide, unless the remote system component is specifically called out, the term Rational Developer for System z refers to the workstation component of the tool: the graphical user interface powered by the Eclipse platform. Rational Developer for System z is a set of development tools that is built on the Rational Software Development Platform, which itself is built on the Eclipse platform (www.eclipse.org). Think of the Eclipse platform as the framework and infrastructure provider and Rational Software Development Platform and Rational Developer for System z as the tools contributors. These tools providers each supply a set of language-specific development tools that run on Eclipse. Rational Software Development Platform provides tools to support the development of web sites and Java™ applications (among others), while Rational Developer for System z provides the tools to support the development, maintenance, and web service enablement of enterprise applications written in COBOL, PL/I, Assembler, and other traditional languages.

The z/OS operating system is very different from a workstation operating system architecturally. To facilitate the correct transport of remote system data sets and files to a disparate system like Windows or Linux, one must explicitly define to Rational Developer for System z the following parameters:
  1. Mapping, which defines the following file transfer parameters:
    1. the file type to be transported (file extension mapping)
    2. the transfer mode (text or binary transfer)
    3. the code pages used on each of the two systems
  2. Port - the communication “channel” used for the transport between the two systems.
The following section describes briefly what these parameters are and the roles that each plays in Rational Developer for System z.
  1. Mapping
    • File type, transfer mode, and code page.

      Most operating systems recognize and differentiate files by their file extensions. For example, a file with the extension .txt is processed as a text file, while a file with the extension .html is processed as a hypertext language file. On the z/OS system, however, the concept of file extensions does not exist. Therefore, each data set type or file, whether it is a PL/I source file or a COBOL copybook, must be explicitly defined in Rational Developer for System z so that it is transported to the workstation and processed correctly.

      In addition to defining file type, it is also important to specify whether to transport a file as text or as binary. Transfer mode takes care of that.

      Finally, a computer system translates keyboard inputs to character values and vice versa, according to the code page specified on each system. While z/OS systems employ the EBCDIC family of code pages, most workstation systems employ the ASCII family of code pages. When a file is transported between these two operating systems, it is important that code page conversion be taken into account so that a file can be translated and displayed correctly on the destination system. Rational Developer for System z handles this translation automatically, but to do so, it needs to know in advance what code pages are being used on the z/OS system and the workstation system respectively. The host code page and the local code page specification supply Rational Developer for System z with this information.

    • Configuration of mapping.

      The configurable mapping serves to accomplish these objectives. Rational Developer for System z provides a set of mapping defaults to simplify the set up. For instance, by default, all data sets with an end qualifier COBOL are mapped to the extension .cbl and to the text transfer mode so that their members would be treated as COBOL source files when transported and opened on the workstation. Similarly, load modules with the end qualifier "LOAD" are mapped to .exe, and are treated as binary files on the workstation when transported. Each z/OS system can have its own mapping. You can customize mapping to suit your site's need by using the z/OS File System Mapping view.

  2. Port

    A port can be thought of as an agreed upon communication channel between the Rational Developer for System z remote system components of a given z/OS system and the Rational Developer for System z workstation component. Typically, during installation, a site's system programmer would have a port number defined for the Remote Daemon port or the REXEC port found in the Server Launcher Setting. While setting up Rational Developer for System z to connect to a z/OS system, you must enter this port number to facilitate remote system-workstation communication.

Working with Rational Developer for System z

One of the challenging adjustments for an experienced ISPF user to make is the transition from ISPF's menu-driven interface to a graphical user interface (GUI) that is composed of views. To understand how to work with these views, you must first understand the functions supported by each view. The following list provides a brief description of the primary purpose of some of the key views in Rational Developer for System z, and the kind of tasks that can be performed with each of them. Additional details of these views can be found in the documentation.
  • Remote Systems

    This view supports the connection to z/OS remote systems, among others. Once a connection configuration is created, you can browse through remote data sets, files, jobs, and others using this view.

    ISPF utilities functions such as data set allocation, rename, or delete (ISPF option 3.2), move and copy (3.3), data set listing (3.4) and other common utilities can be performed using the capabilities provided on this view.

    Similarly, jobs submitted to the job subsystems can be viewed and manipulated under the JES subsystem found in your z/OS system connection definition. You can view a list of jobs, and perform operations such as view output, purge, cancel, hold and others against these jobs. If you want a detailed view of these jobs, you also have the option to display these jobs in a tabular view (select Show in Table from the pop-up menu), which provides a more ISPF-like tabular view of your jobs. To view job output, highlight any completed job and select Open. Job outputs are displayed on the default text editor.

    For information on how to set up a z/OS connection configuration and create filters to view your data sets and jobs, please refer to Creating a connection to a z/OS system.

  • z/OS Projects or Enterprise Projects

    Thez/OS Projects or Enterprise Projects view provides an application-centric view of your data sets and files. You can create a project to organize the data sets and files pertaining to a particular application for a given release. Application oriented actions such as debug and build are supported through this view.

  • System z LPEX Editor

    The System z LPEX Editor is the default editor for editing PL/I, COBOL, and Assembler source files, among others. The System z LPEX Editor extends the base LPEX editor to provide System z-specific capabilities such as syntax checking for these languages, content assist, opening a referenced copybook or include file, the ability to submit a job directly from the editor view, and so forth. The System z LPEX Editor is opened when you highlight a remote source file, and select Open. For more information on using the LPEX Editor, see Getting started with the System z LPEX Editor.

  • Remote Shell

    The Remote Shell view provides a command line interface to support the execution of TSO commands. You can run commands, CLIST, and REXX from the command line and view the output on the same view. The command inputs and outputs can also be saved.

    The Remote Shell view can be opened by selecting TSO Commands in the Remote System Explorer and clickingLaunch TSO.

  • Remote Error List

    The Remote Error List view displays errors resulted from failed operations. Errors such as syntax errors, build problems, code generation and others are displayed on this tabular view.

  • Properties

    The Properties view displays attributes and attribute values of the currently-selected resource. For example, if a data set is selected in the Remote Systems view, the Properties view will list its attributes (BLKSIZE, LRECL, VOLUME, and so forth) and their respective values. Similarly, if a z/OS system is selected, then its connection attributes (system name, code page, job port, and so forth) and their respective values are displayed.

Some tips on using the Eclipse user interface

  1. You can customize the layout and content of any perspectives on Rational Developer for System z by dragging and dropping the views and move them to the desirable location on the user interface. You can also close a view if you do not need the view for your task. To bring a closed view back, simply use the menu Window -> Show View to bring the view back to the user interface. Closing a view would not modify or delete any of its content.
  2. You can quickly maximize the viewing area of a view by double clicking the title of a view. This is especially useful for some of the views such as the System z LPEX Editor and the JES subsystem. To restore the viewing area to the original size, simply double click the view title again.

Help

Rational Developer for System z help information is delivered via the integrated Eclipse help system. To open it, go to the Help menu and select Help Content.

Information contents are organized in “books." Each book provides content on a specific topic or area.

There are two common ways of accessing the contents. You can either use the navigator on the left pane to explore the available help content, or you can use the search function to search for a particular item of interest. By default, the search is performed across all the books. If you want to narrow down the search context, you can restrict the search to a user-defined scope by selecting the Advanced search scope option. The Advanced search feature is recommended if your search result list is consistently too long or contains too many irrelevant results.

The information contents are displayed on the right pane. If you want to print out the information, press the Print button located on the top right corner of the right pane, and then follow your printer's instruction.


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