You can upgrade COBOL applications that were developed in
Net Express,
Server Express to Visual COBOL
or Studio Enterprise Edition and
Mainframe Express to Enterprise Developer without the need to change their code.
All references to Net Express and Server Express in this guide relate to the variants of those products that provided Mainframe
Subsystem Support as part of the Studio Enterprise Edition bundle.
This guide lists the differences between
Net Express,
Server Express,
Mainframe Express and
Enterprise Developer in the following areas:
- Compiling and building
- Having created a project in
Enterprise Developer, you can either use the IDE or the command line to build.
- Run-time systems
- There are some differences between the run-time systems supplied with
Enterprise Developer and those supplied with
Net Express,
Server Express and
Mainframe Express. This, however, will not affect your existing applications and they will continue to run under
Enterprise Developer - you only need to recompile the applications from the source code with
Enterprise Developer.
- Run-time system technologies
- Some technologies behave differently and require some upgrade work.
- Restrictions and unsupported features
- Some features of
Net Express,
Server Express and
Mainframe Express are not available in
Enterprise Developer. However, there are alternative techniques for many of these features.
- Editing and debugging
- Much of the
Net Express,
Server Express and
Mainframe Express functionality for editing and debugging is available in
Enterprise Developer, but sometimes with a different name and with a slightly different behavior. In addition there are some new features such
as background parsing, which highlights errors as you type and code completion techniques that provide easy access to language
elements, enabling you to select and insert them simply.
- Eclipse integration
- Enterprise Developer is integrated with the Eclipse IDE. The development environment provides all the functionality to manage projects and debug
applications.
Applications previously built in
Net Express,
Server Express and
Mainframe Express can be developed and run within the Eclipse IDE.