Micro Focus Modernization Ecosystem: Core Components

The Modernization Landscape

Before we look at specific products, it's useful to understand the different facets of modernization. It's not just about moving code; it's a multi-faceted effort. A great way to frame this is by looking at it through three "lenses": modernizing the application itself, the development process, and the underlying infrastructure.

To get a concise overview of this concept and the Micro Focus suite, let's watch a brief segment from a presentation by AWS and Micro Focus.

As you saw, the key is to build on the strength of existing mainframe applications rather than starting from scratch. The Micro Focus ecosystem is designed to facilitate this by providing a suite of integrated tools. Let's now break down these core components one by one.

The Core Components: Analyze, Develop, Deploy

The modernization process with Micro Focus typically follows a logical flow: analyze the existing system, develop and adapt the code in a modern environment, and finally, deploy it to a new runtime platform. Each stage is supported by a specific component of the Enterprise Suite.

This cycle—Analyze, Develop, Build, Test, Deploy—is a standard software development lifecycle. Your 11 years of experience on the mainframe will have involved similar, if differently named, processes. Here, we'll map the Micro Focus tools to these phases.

The primary resource for understanding the full suite is the product literature. The document below, "Supporting Business Critical Application Modernization," gives a comprehensive overview. Note that Micro Focus was acquired by OpenText, which later sold these products to Rocket Software, so you will see all three company names used in documentation. The tools themselves remain the same.

As the document shows, the main components we are concerned with from a developer's perspective are:

1. Enterprise Analyzer
2. Enterprise Developer
3. Enterprise Server

Let's examine what each of these does.

1. Enterprise Analyzer: The "Analyze" Phase

Before you can migrate or modernize an application, you must understand it. On the mainframe, you might do this by manually tracing code, examining JCL, and relying on system experts. Enterprise Analyzer is designed to automate and deepen this discovery process.

It parses your existing source code—COBOL, PL/I, JCL, CICS definitions, and more—to create a central repository of information about your application portfolio. This allows you to:

• Visualize program call-graphs and data flows.
• Identify "dead" or unused code.
• Assess the complexity of your applications and pinpoint areas of high risk for a migration project.
• Understand dependencies between programs, copybooks, and data files.

Essentially, Enterprise Analyzer provides the blueprint of your existing system, which is the critical first step in any modernization plan.

2. Enterprise Developer: The "Develop" Phase

This is the central tool for you as a developer and where we will spend a significant amount of our time in this course. Enterprise Developer is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that allows you to work with mainframe source code on your local Windows machine.

Since you have experience with Eclipse, you'll find the environment familiar. Enterprise Developer is available as a plugin for both Eclipse and Visual Studio. It provides a modern, feature-rich environment for tasks that are traditionally done on the mainframe via TSO/ISPF.

Key capabilities include:

• Editing: A powerful editor with syntax highlighting, code completion, and real-time syntax checking for COBOL, PL/I, JCL, BMS, and more.
• Compiling: A local COBOL compiler that is highly compatible with mainframe dialects. This means you can compile your code directly on your PC without needing to access the mainframe, dramatically speeding up the edit-compile-test cycle.
• Debugging: A graphical, interactive debugger that lets you step through your COBOL code, inspect variables, and set breakpoints, just as you would with a modern language.
• Testing: An integrated environment for running and testing your batch jobs and online transactions locally. It includes emulators for CICS and IMS, allowing you to test entire applications off the mainframe.

To get a better sense of its capabilities, let's look at the official datasheet for Enterprise Developer.

The key takeaway is that Enterprise Developer brings the entire mainframe development and unit testing process into a modern, efficient IDE that you run locally.

3. Enterprise Server: The "Deploy" Phase

After you've analyzed, adapted, compiled, and tested your application using Enterprise Analyzer and Enterprise Developer, you need a place to run it. This is the role of Enterprise Server.

Enterprise Server is a production-scale application server that emulates the core services of a mainframe environment on a distributed platform (like a Windows or Linux server, either on-premises or in the cloud). It provides the runtime environment for your modernized applications to execute. It's designed to run the exact same COBOL code you tested in Enterprise Developer, ensuring that the business logic remains unchanged.

Enterprise Server provides replacements for key mainframe subsystems:

• Batch Execution: It can interpret and run JCL to execute batch jobs.
• Transaction Processing: It provides a CICS-compatible and an IMS TM-compatible environment to run online transactions.
• Data Access: It manages access to migrated file formats (like VSAM) and can connect to relational databases (like DB2, SQL Server, or PostgreSQL).

In short, Enterprise Server is the target deployment platform that makes your mainframe applications feel at home in a non-mainframe world.

Conclusion

In this lesson, we've taken our first step into the world of mainframe modernization with Micro Focus. We've established a high-level map of the territory by identifying the core components of the ecosystem and their respective roles.

Key Takeaways:

• Modernization with Micro Focus focuses on re-platforming—running existing application code on new infrastructure with minimal changes—rather than rewriting.
• The process can be broken down into a familiar Analyze-Develop-Deploy cycle.
• The core components of the Micro Focus ecosystem map directly to this cycle:
  • Enterprise Analyzer: Assesses and provides deep understanding of the existing mainframe application portfolio.
  • Enterprise Developer: A modern IDE (for Eclipse or Visual Studio) for local development, compilation, and debugging of mainframe applications.
  • Enterprise Server: A production-ready runtime environment that emulates mainframe services (CICS, IMS, JCL) on distributed platforms like Windows, Linux, and the cloud.

Now that you have this conceptual overview, we can begin building the practical skills needed to work in this new environment. In the next lesson, we will get hands-on with the foundational layer of the distributed world: the command-line interface. You will learn to navigate the file system and manage files, essential skills for using any development tools, including Git and Enterprise Developer, on platforms like Windows and Linux.