As its contributions to IBM Corp’s announcements last week, Micro Focus Plc released enhancements to its Cobol/2 Workbench to comply with IBM’s new AD/Cycle integration strategy and introduced the Micro Focus Dialog System, a tool to enable programmers to build Presentation Manager graphical user interfaces for Cobol applications with no prior knowledge of low-level Presentation Manager Application Programming Interfacess, C programming techniques or event-driven programming styles, and the thing is included in the IBM AD/Cycle framework. Dialog System, part of the Cobol/2 Workbench family, isolates screen and keyboard logic from the application. User interface screens can be prototyped away from the Cobol application, tested, changed as needed, then linked to the Cobol program, the company says, involving users early in the process so they can ask for changes. Interfaces can be run under MS-DOS using the graphical user interface emulation mode, under Windows or under Presentation Manager; it also has facilities for development of character mode user interfaces executable across MS-DOS, OS/2, and Unix environments. Micro Focus also says the next release of Cobol/2 Workbench will include AD/Cycle integration features and will enable users to access source code stored on hosts under IBM’s Software Configuration and Library Manager. Animator will be enhanced with common functionality and terminology with IBM’s AD/Cycle CoOperative Development Environment/370, CODE/370. Animator supports unit testing on the micro and with CODE/370, Cobol programmers have a complementary co-operative debug facility adding host integration and system test capabilities to workstation test functions.
