CICS Development and Rational Tools

The next few weeks and months will be a time of change to some hugely important aspects of life in CICS Development. We saying goodbye to our much-loved LCS (Library Control System) which has been the most important tool since way before I joined in 1987. LCS has held the vast majority of the CICS source code for every release since…. well, I don’t actually know when! (I just looked at one of the REXX execs implementing LCS and it has change history going back to 1982.)

Over the years we’ve had people come along approximately every 4 or 5 years with an offer to give us a new system to store our source code and provide a development environment. We’d look at who they are and what they were offering… and politely decline their offer. Having the luxury of a bespoke system is hard to beat!

However, it’s been getting harder to get the new folks on the team to be quite as enthusiastic about a VM/CMS command line and XEDIT.

So from now on all 18,000+ source files are entrusted to Jazz technology in Rational Team Concert (RTC) v3, and our development environment is Eclipse-based with a bang up to date build system based on Apache Ant on z/OS. And this is a hugely positive move – RTC, in contrast to the previous replacement candidates, allows us to maintain the most important aspects of how we’ve worked with LCS, but has the potential to re-energise our development habits. It’s going to be an exciting time!

We’ll all have to work out the best ways to configure our RTC clients. I prefer separate windows to alt-tab around so I’m going with a perspective with detached views – Eclipse is so flexible that I suspect I’ll be playing around with the options for a while. Here’s what my development desktop is looking like currently…

(click on the image for a better view)

That’s not an editor in a 3270 – I just find the black background more comfortable, honest!