Rational Programming Patterns for System z

Features and benefits

IBM Rational Programming Patterns for System z enhances the set of development/delivery tools of IBM Rational Developer for System z and IBM Rational Team Concert with additional new functionality adapted to the Pacbase Pattern Driven development paradigm for the development and the maintenance of applications that have been developed with VisualAge Pacbase v3.5.

• Using a modern, comprehensive and collaborative IDE allows Pacbase developers to maintain a high level of individual productivity, while unifying development processes and tools with System z and Java developers
• Modernizes the Pacbase Model Driven Development (MDD) approach, providing new models for data, Batch and Transactional applications, generators targeting System z and Jazz based repository services for Pacbase artifacts
• Lowers the cost of the migration from Pacbase, providing a set of tools to minimize the amount of regression testing needed post-migration

IBM Rational Programming Patterns for System z addresses the full spectrum of traditional business application requirements including the following features:

Data description patterns help to master the information concept of an IT system

Data description patterns enable the encapsulation of concepts that make up the IT systems in a form that is understandable by a business domain specialist, and yet is also consumable by those whose main expertise is software development. This abstraction improves the capabilities to control and administer the semantic of an IT system and to reuse the enterprise information concepts in all the components of an IT system.

Copybook definitions are supported by the Data description patterns to generate COBOL copybooks for the following targets:

• IBM z/OS

Database definitions are supported by the Data description patterns to generate Database schemas for the following targets:

• DB2
• DL1
• IDMS
• Datacom
• Oracle

Programming Patterns improve the development productivity for traditional applications

Programming Patterns for Traditional applications improve the development and maintenance productivity of the developers by providing a set of models that capture the essence of the common architecture of mainframe Batch and Transactional applications. With these patterns, a developer focuses on the business logic rather than the structure of the program and the complexity of the technology. An organization adopting this development paradigm streamlines COBOL development because Pattern Driven Programming allows for accurate and predictable work estimation, consistent code performance, high quality generated code, as well as guaranteed homogeneous coding styles, algorithms and structures across many programs.

Batch program definitions are supported by the Programming Patterns for traditional applications to generate Batch transaction processing and reporting applications with their error handling resources for the following targets:

• IBM z/OS
  Databases supported: DB2, DL1, IDMS, Datacom and Oracle

Online program definitions are supported by the Programming Patterns for traditional applications to generate Textual User Interface applications with their error and end-user help handling resources for the following targets:

• IBM z/OS / CICS with BMS maps or with dynamic map management
  Databases supported: DB2, DL1, IDMS, Datacom and Oracle
• IBM z/OS / IMS with MFS maps or with dynamic map management
  Databases supported: DB2 and DL1

Macro-Structure Pattern automates the implementation of the architectural standards of an organization

Macro-structure Pattern provides a powerful and expressive capability for reusing logic among programs. It minimizes complexity through encapsulation while providing a single point of enhancement, modification applicable to all programs calling a macro-structure pattern. The code written in a macro-structure pattern includes substitution parameters that are resolved when included in a given program.

Macro-structure Pattern is a first-class tool to extend and adapt the standard generated source code with the architectural standards of an organization.

COBOL Micro-Patterns contribute to increase the development productivity

A COBOL micro-pattern is a powerful way to insert a group or several groups of generated COBOL lines in a COBOL program. A COBOL micro-pattern is identified by an annotation with parameters used by a dedicated generator to insert COBOL source code usually after the location of the annotation in the COBOL program.

As Rational Programming Patterns for System z requires to use native COBOL code to add user-specific code in a generated program, the COBOL micro-patterns replace favorably complex Pacbase operators, preserving the productivity of a developer when he has to insert business logic in a generated source code.

Extended COBOL source code editor facilitates the maintenance of user-specific code in the generated source code

IBM Rational Programming Patterns for System z extends the Rational Developer for System z COBOL source code editor (LPEX) to optimize the tasks a developer has to manage in a generated COBOL source code. New views, filters, wizards and COBOL lines colorization actively support the developer in addition of the first-class functions provided by the standard System z COBOL source code editor such as content assist, real-time syntax check, interactive debugging. All these tools keep, even improve, the development productivity of a Pacbase developer.

Impact analysis and multi-criteria search contribute to increase the maintenance productivity

IBM Rational Programming Patterns for System z extends the Rational Team Concert Repository services to provide impact analysis and multi-criteria search dedicated to the development artifacts migrated from Pacbase. Search can combine various technical or semantic criteria to help a developer to keep the consistency of the IT system descriptions, to preserve the uniqueness of the description of an information concept and by the way to make reliable the result of an impact analysis query, improving the maintenance productivity of the developers.

Interface with external Software Configuration Managers provides a flexible time frame to adapt current application deployment processes

IBM Rational Programming Patterns for System z provides procedures to extract projects or components from the IBM Rational Team Concert SCM to import them in an external SCM. This feature allows an organization to quickly take advantage of the latest collaborative application life cycle management technology provided by IBM Rational Team Concert while using some deployment processes attached to an external SCM when it is needed.

Migration from VisualAge Pacbase v3.5 at low cost

The generators provided by IBM Rational Programming Patterns for System z generate a COBOL source code syntactically equivalent to the COBOL source code generated by VisualAge Pacbase v3.5. This generation capability, in conjunction with a set of comparator tools to check that the migration went well drastically limits the amount of non-regression test cases needed post-migration,representing the most expensive part of the migration project.

 

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