Background

In 2001, IBM made the Eclipse development environment available to the Open Source community. A consortium was created at www.eclipse.org to promote this tool to developers and create a community of vendors who use the new standard.

The current success of Eclipse is remarkable. Most major development operators, such as Borland, have rallied to the standard, and it is estimated that over 75% of Java developers use Eclipse every day. This success is not the result of chance or heavy marketing, but of a truly unanimous adoption of a function-rich environment with exceptional customization capacity. WDSc was designed with an open, modular architecture to allow technical tool providers like ARCAD Software to develop plug-in modules for total integration with the new environment.

What is WDSC ?

WebSphere Development Studio Client (WDSc) is a powerful development environment (ILE) specifically intended for the System i. It is based on Eclipse. WDSc is the official replacement for 5250 SEU, SDA, RLU, and PDM tools. WDSc is designed to:

• Increase teams’ productivity by providing more in-depth tool functions
• Bring together mixed System i and new technology teams into a single development environment.

However, it cannot by itself guarantee secure management of application changes. You will need an Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tool to ensure synchronization of your software development. This is the domain of ARCAD-Skipper, a complete workshop to maintain your heterogeneous development environment. 

A More Productive Environment

A development environment’s quality is rooted in a large number of carefully thought-out details that will save developers’ precious time. There are a number of these well-designed assets in WDSc: source code indenting and coloring, direct access to fields in code writing, return of compilation results directly into the source code, simultaneous debugging of Java and native code, work environment customization options, etc. The list goes on. What’s more, every possible step has been taken so that developers that do not want their old reflexes to get rusty can hold onto them as much as they like. For example, he can type ‘C’ to copy a line of code while his colleague uses the mouse to do the same thing. This is an open environment that respects users’ freedom-and this is the secret of WDSc’s enormous success.

ARCAD Plugins within Eclipse

ARCAD Software provides its clients with total integration of its ARCAD-Skipper maintenance and development workshop into WDSc, RAD, and Eclipse development environments.
Integrated as plug-ins, ARCAD-Skipper’s functions blend into these environments to give developers a range of tools to help with their daily work.

These include:

• Complete user request management (Incident Reports, Modification Requests)
• Monitoring of tasks assigned to developers
• A tool for component versioning, with automatic integrity checks
• Automated transfers to test and production
• Synchronized deployment to production server

More about the ARCAD Software Plug-Ins

ARCAD currently offers 6 different plug-ins:

• ARCAD plug-in for Changer Client to manage Java/Web application development processes in Eclipse/WDSC and RAD
• ARCAD plug-in for Changer to handle native application change processes
• ARCAD Cross References plug-in to access functions associated with multi-platform cross-references. These have been available in V8.04 since late 2005. There are lots of functions available: Access to all cross-references (components, fields, calling chains). In a multi-platform situation, inter-platform component relationships are equally accessible. You can also manually add dependencies into the ARCAD Repository.
  All these small operating details were carefully developed to continuously improve productivity and ease of use; the return of end-of-job messages, spool consultation, the insertion of compilation results into source code, and many more.
• ARCAD Request Tracking plug-in, to manage user requests (Incident Reports, Change Requests) and internal IT service documents such as Maintenance Reports
• ARCAD plug-in for Macromaker allows execution of all processes written in the internal macro-language, MacroMaker. This plug-in became available this year with the release of V8.05. All transfers to test and production, and all other automated functions you define, can be directly controlled within the environment.
• ARCAD plug-in Console handles all the administrative functions of the ARCAD suites.