EWO Software is a technical partner of MCRB's and are the developers of the Application Express family of application partitioning, offloading and documentation software products. The products operate primarily on MVS. The offloading product (to the PC platform) is marketed by MicroFocus.
MCRB offers the following services for both end users and consultants:
Companies have less than 1000 days to tackle the Year 2000 issues. The keys to success are the ability to identify the Applications that are involved and then to fix the source code effecting the dates in the Application.
AED greatly increases the productivity of programming, analysis, and operations by performing time consuming and repetitive tasks for the programmer. It features a very powerful set of algorithms for the analysis of the principal components of software applications, Jobs, PROCs, Programs, subroutines, copybooks and data. It analyzes and then automatically produces the code necessary to offload the application code and datasets in minutes rather than hours or days as is currently needed with manual methods. Programmers now can develop applications and maintain software at a much more accurate level in record time. AED is instrumental for programmers involved in the application of YEAR/2000 upgrade projects.
AED makes the programming analysis and workflow efficient, accurate, and more effective in a shorter period of time than with manual methods. In order for the edit, test, debug development cycle to work well, it is very important for the programmer to have all the elements of the software and data at the mainframe properly and accurately identified prior to offload to the PC. This pre-offload step is essential today given the workload of most data centers.
AED is easy to use and provides an online ISPF dialog for the user to select jobs to be offloaded. AED reads JCL Members, the PROCs, programs, copybooks, subroutines and obtains detailed information about dataset names coded in the JCL and PROCs. AED incorporates many additional features such as cross referencing and execution component reports for use by the programmer for documentation and audit trail records. AED is robust in its report capability such as the information provided detailing the code and files that will be transferred and the files(if any) that will not be transferred.
During the analysis phase, AED produces a file containing JCL to perform the unload. This JCL file can be edited to add or delete files or to change the number of records being unloaded, if required. AED works with code in PDSs, Panvalet, Librarian, Endevor and tape managers such as TLMS. It can be run using batch JCL exclusively as needed. AED eliminates those files from the offload that would be created or deleted in the first execution of the jobs on the PC platform. This substantially reduces the amount of data that gets offloaded.
The first file on the unloaded tape is JCL that is used to reload the code to a mainframe. So reloading the code back is a matter of executing one IEBGENER to load this JCL to disk and then executing this JCL.
Overall, AED is the missing link between your production applications and your date analysis software. AED assures the user full control over all aspects of its operations and almost 100% accuracy in the transfer of programs and data. CICS, IMS, and DB-2 applications are supported fully.
JCL members or CICS/IMS Transactions are the starting point of AED. These are combined with the associated PROCs to create an intermediate dataset. Program analysis is then done after the selection of libraries. AED can create a CICS transaction table from the PCT and the RDO dataset. The IMS transaction table is created from the IMS transaction macro dataset AED generates documentation and creates unload code when the JCL members have been specified. The JCL members are combined with their associated PROCs to create an intermediate dataset. This dataset is used as the starting point for the analysis.
In short, the user needs to decide which members to document or unload/download and select them. In addition, if the JCL or any PROCs have been changed the user needs to perform the selection process again. The user should use the online dialog to select a limited number of members. If the user needs to select all or most of the members in a library (typically, for global cross references), the user should run a batch job. JCL and Cataloged Procedures (PROCs) can be in a PDS or they can be in a Panvalet/Librarian dataset. It is recommend that JCLs and PROCs should be syntactically correct (i.e. conform to JCL coding rules).
By allowing the user to specify the PROC libraries and their selection sequence, AED allows change of the automatic search rules for PROCs that JES uses to find the PROC members. This means that the user need to specify the correct PROC concatenation order when the user want to imitate the normal JES search sequence.
The ability to read and analyze source code in conjunction with JCL is one of the unique features of AED. The source code can be tracked for up to 20 levels(and above as required) of CALLS. On this screen the user can specify the libraries where the source programs can be found. Although the screen allows the user to specify only three datasets in each category, the user can add more datasets by typing JCL on the ISPF command line and manually editing the JCL.
AED also identifies a number of cases where source code is missing. AEO contains support for a number of reallife situations in which source may not be immediately available.
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