It used to be that the mainframe was an island of technology just as much as the PC once was. But we have seen that distinction blur and nowhere more so than in the world of software development.
Today’s mainframe programmers are just as much at home writing in Java and C as they once were writing in COBOL and PL/I. They are happy editing, compiling and testing in TSO/ISPF on a green screen or debugging, optimizing and tuning in the GUI of Eclipse.
Even the execution environment has morphed into an array of choices that are designed to match the profile of the application and the user experience. z/OS is happy serving up web pages and z/Linux can be your transaction processing hub, Unix System Services (USS) might host your data while CICS serves up web services.
The freedom to select our technology topology to suit our business and application needs is very liberating. But there is a price to pay. Managing all this code and ensuring the integrity of those myriad of pieces is complex. This is why Serena introduced the ChangeMan ZMF Client Pack (screenshot above) and added support for z/Linux and USS deployments.
The Client Pack is designed to provide developers with the ability to use the same Software Change and Release Management solution they have always used, ChangeMan ZMF, whether they are developing in Eclipse or an Eclipse-based IDE like Rational Developer for z/Series (RDz) or Windows IDE’s, such as the ones from Micro Focus. Simple plug-in technologies instantly make the ChangeMan ZMF repositories available on your chosen platform with full access to the code you are working on and the ability to manage the change packages right there from the software menus.
Support for long filenames and member names was introduced into ChangeMan ZMF two versions ago to enable developers who want to write in Java and C for the mainframe to do so under full change control. Developers can see the full 1024 byte file names and 256 byte members names on the mainframe and from their Eclipse, or Eclipse-based, IDE’s. This makes ChangeMan ZMF the only solution to give developers complete access through one technology. The previous version of ZMF added support for Hierarchical File System (HFS) used on USS and z/Linux File System (ZFS), which means your release can con now be deployed to all the mainframe platforms from one solution.
So whatever your development or execution environment, only ChangeMan ZMF supports where you want to be for all your developers and their applications.
