Micro Focus has launched a branded Enterprise Developer Personal Edition IDE for IBM mainframe application modernization. This free version of the full Micro Focus Enterprise Developer product is billed as "entry-level" for newer developers, hobbyists, and students and comes with an Eclipse or Visual Studio IDE.
Despite the prowess and power that its software clearly packs, Micro Focus is frustratingly generic when it comes to explaining and justifying its tools' usefulness and functionality.
As such, Micro Focus director Kevin Brearley is quoted as saying, "IT teams need new approaches to balance the essential work of keeping the business functioning and enabling innovation initiatives to improve corporate performance. This means addressing challenges that directly impact time to market in order to remain competitive and sustain business growth — namely skills, productivity, quality resources, and integration."
Reducing the Gap
Brearley gets a little closer to the mark when he explains how Enterprise Developer Personal Edition has been created to improve developer agility when performing day-to-day mainframe development activities and helps address the mainframe skills shortage by reducing the gap between COBOL, Java, and C# developers in a collaborative IDE environment.
The product comes with smart COBOL editing, syntax checking, and compilation to create a way to modernize, develop, and maintain mainframe applications.
