Zowe Explorer Reaches Milestone
What a great journey it has been! I’ve met so many awesome individuals while working on this project and could not be more excited to share that Zowe Explorer has reached 10,000 unique installations. From the initial development of this Visual Studio Code extension for mainframe in the summer of 2018, to contributing the project to Zowe, and now with the emergence of a dedicated Zowe Explorer squad, it has been exciting to see the interest grow. Congratulations everyone!
Origins
While developing for another Zowe technology, the Zowe CLI, many of us were leveraging VS Code. We had written numerous scripts to facilitate our interactions with z/OS but were seeking tighter integration with the editor. Dan Kelosky constructed a prototype VS Code extension enabling access to z/OS data sets. And thus, the adventure began!
Zowe Explorer emerged from Broadcom’s Pittsburgh office in the summer of 2018 when a team of interns began developing the solution with technical guidance from Jason Tucker— Charlotte Deiss (Carnegie Mellon University), Mike Heuzey (Penn State University), Ashley Hong (Carnegie Mellon University), Jon Norris (University of Pittsburgh) and Michael Norris (Penn State University). The first version of the Zowe Explorer was published on the VS Code marketplace on August 29th, 2018.
If you would like to see what the original extension looked like check out this throwback YouTube video.
The Power of the Zowe Community
The Zowe Explorer code was then contributed to Zowe a month later. Since the initial contribution, the project has grown significantly as more than 30 contributors have authored over 2,000 commits to the repository. Thanks to significant contributions from Colin Stone among others, the technology was enhanced with the ability to interact with USS files and jobs on the mainframe. Today, the Zowe Explorer squad, which is led by Fernando Rijo Cedeno, continues to improve the extension.
In addition to code contributions, others have constructed content to help folks get started with the tech including Jessielaine Punongbayan who has published multiple blogs leveraging Zowe Explorer. In addition, William Pereira from the Zowe Onboarding Squad has contributed multiple videos on getting started with various components of Zowe.
The Zowe Explorer has also been leveraged by the Open Mainframe Project’s COBOL Programming Course.
VS Code Extensions for Mainframe Emerge
Since Zowe Explorer was added to the marketplace, other VS Code extensions for mainframe users have been developed.
Zowe Explorer has also been included in a VS Code Extension Pack named Code4z. The Code4z pack is intended to be a set of extensions for developers working with z/OS applications. In addition to Zowe Explorer, the following extensions are included:
COBOL Language Support provides autocomplete, highlighting and diagnostic features for COBOL code and copybooks.
HLASM Language Support provides code completion, highlighting, browsing and validation for High Level Assembler language.
Explorer for Endevor gives you the ability to browse and retrieve CA Endevor® elements with a user-friendly, intuitive interface. This extension offers the best developer experience with Bridge for Git, a solution which enables you to concurrently work with an enterprise Git server and the mainframe.
Debugger for Mainframe provides the debugging interface to CA InterTest™ for CICS. This extension provides a modern debug experience for COBOL applications running in a CICS region.
Getting Started
Not sure where to begin?
Reviewing the Zowe Explorer entry on the VS Code marketplace is a good place to start. Next, be sure to join the #zowe-explorer channel on the Open Mainframe Project slack. Then check out these YouTube videos to get started: Getting Started with Zowe Explorer Part 1 & Zowe Explorer Video: How to Work with Data Sets Part 2. In addition, Mainframe Bytes provides multiple YouTube videos leveraging the Zowe Explorer.
If you would like to get started with Zowe Explorer while also getting started with COBOL, I recommend checking out the Open Mainframe Project’s COBOL Programming Course #1.
If you run into an issue or want to suggest an enhancement, please reach out on Slack or open an issue in our GitHub repo. I hope to hear from you soon! 😄
