COBOL & Mainframe Modernization: COVID-19 Response
First, I hope you and your loved ones are safe and healthy as we all cope with the ongoing pandemic. This article is intended as a resource for those seeking to modernize their mainframe application development in response to this current global challenge, and others that may follow.
While some organizations view mainframe modernization as a means to better productivity, I see it as the way to accelerate the speed of mainframe software delivery to meet fast-changing needs. The heritage for mainframe is a linear and sequential waterfall approach to software delivery but it can have velocity that matches other architectures and platforms, without sacrificing quality.
The pandemic illustrates the demand for readiness for unplanned, urgent needs (i.e., speed).
What if 16 million people became unemployed within a few weeks, as happened in the US? An unrealistic possibility only a few months ago is now a reality. The COVID-19 pandemic has placed an enormous strain on public and private sector mainframe applications ranging from logistics to benefits, to the point where state governors have issued public calls for assistance.
In a world now accustomed to immediate results, delays due to legacy processes and technologies are unacceptable. Cross-platform applications that combine mainframe systems of record with cloud and mobile systems of engagement must perform seamlessly to address rapidly-changing needs: both marketplace and societal.
The solution is to open the mainframe to the process and tools used by cloud and mobile developers for speed and quality: open source-driven DevOps. DevOps, which is used by digital-natives like Netflix and Amazon, is a process built around delivering small increments of work into production quickly and with high quality. Another virtue of DevOps is that it comes with powerful tools used by the rest of the IT organization, many of which are open sourced.
Open source means the tools are free to use and, harnessing the power of community, can be quickly enhanced to meet fast-changing needs, like those emerging from the pandemic.
Visual Studio Code — Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
Developers spend most of their days in an IDE and, until recently, the choice for mainframe developers has been between the green screens of TSO/ISPF and the heavy client experience of Eclipse with proprietary extensions.
With open source extensions for the mainframe recently introduced by Broadcom, developers can now use the wildly popular Visual Studio Code tool for their mainframe applications. An estimated 8.5M developers use the lightweight VS Code IDE, opening a vast talent pool to mainframe modernization.
Many of the following tools are available in the Code4z extension pack for Visual Studio Code, which is available for download now in the VS Code Marketplace.
COBOL Language Support
COBOL is the dominant language for mainframe applications and an estimated 220 billion lines of COBOL are still in use today. Each language has its own syntax and semantics that make them challenging to use in an IDE — hence the bulky legacy extensions for Eclipse. The Language Server Protocol (LSP), which was created for VS Code, addresses this need in an elegant way. Broadcom has contributed the COBOL LSP extension to the open source community so developers can now use VS Code for their COBOL applications.
File Access via Zowe Explorer
Developers and systems administrators need access to the mainframe’s z/OS operating system for files, data sets and jobs. Rather than forcing them to use TSO / ISPF and other mainframe-native tools, the Zowe open source framework, which is hosted by the Linux Foundation’s Open Mainframe Project, offers the Zowe Explorer, an easy-to-use tool for accessing mainframe files, data sets and jobs directly from VS Code. Learn more about the Zowe Explorer extension via the videos embedded here.
Source Code Access via Explorer for Endevor
CA Endevor is the dominant source code and CI/CD pipeline management tool for the mainframe, similar to Git + Jenkins in the distributed world. For mainframe teams using CA Endevor for mainframe source code management, the Explorer for Endevor extension for VS Code is available to browse repositories to find code, pull it into a working directory to modify and add back via the Zowe CLI (included in Zowe Explorer).
Source Code Access via Git
For mainframe teams interested in adopting Git version control, Broadcom offers the CA Endevor Bridge for Git. This enables next-generation developers to use the tool they know and love — Git — without disrupting career mainframers who use CA Endevor for build and deploy as well as source code management. CA Endevor Bridge for Git connects to popular enterprise Git servers like GitHub, GitLab and Atlassian BitBucket.
To see how all these pieces come together in a modern mainframe experience, see this presentation by product manager, Vaughn Marshall, with co-presenter Phil Holleran of GitHub (demo begins @:24).
I invite you to join the community using the Code4z extension pack and let us know how it can be more responsive to your needs. And consider becoming an open source code contributor to help address the needs of the current crisis.
By enabling developers to work with modern DevOps tools and processes, the mainframe becomes ‘just another platform’ and COBOL becomes ‘just another language’. In doing so, we free developers to solve the world’s challenges.
Stay safe and healthy.
