COBOL / PL/I Application Development for IMS Workshop

This introductory presentation describes the business imperative for and benefits to be derived from modernizing IMS application assets. It examines the application, personnel, and costs challenges, and shows how IBM is providing tools, technology, and educational offerings to help you meet these challenges. Myths about the mainframe will be dispelled, and compelling data about the cost benefits of partnering IMS and Rational Developer for System Z are highlighted.

As an application developer working with existing IMS applications you will be required to discover and understand the IMS data that these applications rely on. This session demonstrates how DLIModel Utility can help you to visualize and understand the hierarchical structure of your IMS databases by presenting the database structures defined by the IMS DBD and PSB files in a nice visual model. The visual database representation will aid in application development, by providing the developer with a very clear and intuitively easy understanding of the underlying database. This session will include a live demo that will show the capabilities of this free offering by IMS.

Another tool to assist application developers working with IMS applications analyze their application assets is Rational Asset Analyzer (RAA). This presentation provides an overview of RAA, which accelerates the discovery and analysis of applications in any new development projects or maintenance efforts. You will learn how to identify not only impacts across the enterprise, but also what areas to test, reducing risk and improving test coverage.

Rational Developer for System z (RDz) makes traditional mainframe development and integrated mixed workload or composite development faster and more efficient. This session is designed to give you a high-level and hands-on view of the z/OS® Application Development component of RDz 7.5.

This session has 3 major components: A lecture, a demo, and a hands-on lab. The lecture provides the high-level overview of RDz. The demo takes you through the steps of using the Remote System Explorer component of RDz to work with remote mainframe systems. We will define a remote z/OS system, set up a z/OS project, edit, compile, and debug a COBOL IMS application. Finally, for the hands-on experience you will work with a sample COBOL program that accesses a database and uses the editing, compiling, and running capabilities of RDz.

Enterprise Modernization is one of the biggest mandates that businesses face today. When it comes to IMS, we provide a full range of modernization and SOA enablement solutions. In this session, we demonstrate how simple it is to web enable one of the most common types of the legacy IMS assets: MFS green screen applications.

This session explores the Enterprise COBOL method by which object-oriented COBOL and Java (distributed or mainframe) communicate. It demonstrates how to create object-oriented COBOL applications that can leverage Java technologies, including how to convert procedural COBOL to this new paradigm without modifying the original procedural COBOL application. Java developers can now access the rich library of existing procedural COBOL applications, enhancing and maintaining those applications, enabling COBOL developers
to focus on creating new, high performing COBOL applications to meet business needs.

We will close the workshop by reviewing the content that was presented and identifying several steps that you can take to begin to plan for and modernize your COBOL application assets for IMS.

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