HostBridge Eclipse IDE
The HostBridge Eclipse Integrated Development Environment, an Eclipse plug-in, provides the functionality and tooling developers need to develop and deploy integration scripts and/or web services from mainframe resources more easily and rapidly.
Developing HostBridge integration scripts and/or web services using our JavaScript-based facility will be familiar to the majority of developers. Mainframe and distributed developers will find the HB Eclipse IDE to be the easiest, most flexible, most powerful of the mainframe integration development tools. With it, they can rapidly access data, execute commands, and automate complex transactions via single HTTP, SOAP, or MQ requests.
Capabilities
The HB Eclipse IDE is a workstation-based IDE that allows developers to:
- Author and edit scripts
- Interactively compile, execute, and debug scripts
- Save compiled scripts on the mainframe in a VSAM file, under the control of CICS
- Convert COBOL copybooks to the equivalent ECMAScript and XML
- Generate and test SOAP requests
- Generate WSDLs to define web services.
Runtime efficiency is outstanding because scripts are compiled. The HB Eclipse IDE plugs into RDz, CICS Explorer, and other Eclipse environments.
HB Transaction Explorer
One of the productivity components of the IDE is the HB Transaction Explorer. Utilizing HostBridge XML auto-generated from CICS application output, Transaction Explorer replicates live CICS screens inside the development interface with highest possible fidelity to the source application. This provides developers with a powerful “visual” tool for navigating CICS applications and developing “fine grained,” high-fidelity scripts/services.
Predefined Objects
HostBridge Process Automation ships with predefined program objects that can be used within a script, allowing it to perform a wide range of operations – virtually anything a COBOL program can do. Some of these objects are:
- CICS command-level access
- CICS transaction execution
- COMMAREA program execution
- Simple API for XML (SAX) parser
- SOAP RPC response writing support
- Others.
Others predefined objects are available as optional modules, including VSAM, DB2, DL/I, and MQ modules. These are described on the HostBridge Data Access Modules page.
