Mainframe, MVS and zOS Discussion

Hi,

One of our applications is supposed to get migrated to Microfocus. I might work as a programmer; I wonder how mature Microfocus platform is? Does anyone of you have this experience? And tell what tools are required from start for data migrations specially?

Hello.

I've been on the peripheries of a migration project that used this, so I know what it's intended to do, but I've not had much experience developing for it.

The objective of the product is to provide a mainframe-like environment that is close enough to the real thing that you can download your source, re-compile, and run your applications without too much modification. You even run your jobs using JCL. The main difference is that it's based around PC development tools and has GUI interfaces for everything rather than being terminal-based.

I was involved in the support for an application that was partially ported to it. The application went from running with DB2 to using PC-based Oracle, so relational database support is not a problem. There's language support for COBOL and PL/I, possibly other languages. There are, I believe simulations of stuff like VSAM and CICS available, but I'm not sure about IMS; we were only really dealing with stuff that was originally COBOL/DB2 and had no need for those things.

It's been around for a while, and is a mature product that's in common use. I've certainly seen jobs advertised for it many times over the years, so it doesn't look like a dead-end career-wise particularly as there should be a high degree of skills crossover between the two platforms.