Modernize pattern-driven programming for Pacbase applications

IBM Rational® Programming Patterns is a collaborative Integrated Development Environment part of the Jazz™ Collaborative Lifecycle Management solutions. It provides Pattern Driven Programming features for an enhanced coding experience combined with tools for impact analysis, quality control, and extensibility as well as procedures for automatic Pacbase applications secured migration.

Features

• **Secured migration: **Procedures migrate at a low cost the Pacbase assets to a comprehensive and strategic development environment that surpasses Pacbase capabilities. The generated code is syntactically equivalent to the Pacbase code. Comparison tools ensure that the migration was correct. Non-regression tests and training of the Pacbase developers are limited and the continuity of Pacbase high-level development and maintenance productivity is ensured. Pacbase and IBM Z developers now work in a common platform.
• **Design features: **Data description patterns help to master the information concept of an IT system in a form that is understandable by a business domain specialist and consumable by software developers. Rational Programming Patterns provides dedicated design editors for entities used in batch, transactional, client/server, and eBusiness 2.5 applications. It also provides design tools such as renaming, moving, duplicating, comparing, documenting, or publishing.
• **COBOL source management: **An extended COBOL code editor facilitates the maintenance of user code through filters, wizards, syntax highlighting, content assist, real-time syntax check, and interactive debugging. Code is encapsulated and reused in programs through Macros that minimize complexity while providing a single point of maintenance. Generated COBOL lines can be easily inserted through micropatterns. The generation is not limited to IBM code. The desynchronization of a generated file with its design is detected.
• **Extensibility: **The Software Development Kit makes the development of a new generator easier by breaking up the complexity of a transformation into small tasks through Micropatterns and Skeletons.
• The Application Programming Interface can be used to extend the Rational Programming Patterns functions and tailor them in Java. For example, it can be used to navigate the models in a special way, create user command lines and menus, or customize quality control rules, micropatterns, and patterns.
• **Integration with Rational Team Concert: **Procedures for extracting projects or components from Rational Team Concert and importing them are available. Impact analysis and multi-criteria search, as an extension of the Rational Team Concert repository services, contribute to increase the maintenance productivity.
• The Rational Team Concert control features are extended. Rational Programming Patterns specific preconditions can be used to ensure that the files that are about to be delivered to the server conform to predefined requirements.

Benefits

• **Modernize development: **Uses the Pacbase MDD approach, providing new models for data, batch and transactional applications and generators, targeting IBM Z® systems and Jazz-based repository services for Pacbase artifacts.
• **Improve collaboration: **Provides a collaborative integrated development environment (IDE), enabling developers to maintain individual productivity while unifying development processes and tools with IBM Z systems and Java®.
• **Extend value: **Enhances utilization of IBM Developer for z/OS® and IBM Rational Developer for AIX® and LINUX® through a dedicated COBOL source code editor with features that optimize tasks in COBOL source code.
• **Increase productivity: **Includes impact analysis and multi-criteria search services for development artifacts stored in Rational Team Concert repositories.
• **Secured migration: **Provides procedures for extracting projects or components from VisualAge Pacbase and importing them into Rational Team Concert. Also enables transition from other 4GL through extensibility APIs.
• **Extensibility: **Provides APIs to support new application or technical architectures, and a Software Development Kit (SDK) to target the developments in a specific language or for a particular operating environment.