Micro Focus Plc has come out with a greatly enhanced version of its CICS Option development environment, which is designed for developing CICS transaction processing applications to run on IBM Corp mainframes or client-server systems: CICS OS/2, CICS/6000 and the Micro Focus Transaction System. CICS Option v3.0 is a multi-user, multi-tasking environment that runs under OS/2, MS-DOS, Windows and Unix. Programming support is extended to include the CICS/ESA 3.3 command-level application programming interface and a large subset of the system programming interface. The integrated tool set includes a new screen painter, new resource definition facilities, an enhanced command processor and full CICS emulation, and communicates with other copies of CICS Option and with IBM’s mainframe and network-based CICS. Under their alliance, IBM and Micro Focus are working on a common integrated application development environment for CICS which will include Micro Focus development tools and IBM CICS production technology, to be the basis of the next release of CICS Option. CICS Option has been constructed so that most CICS applications can be downsized without modification – most programs should need no more than moving the application source code to the CICS Option, re-translating, compiling and then running the transaction. The new BMS Advanced Screen Painter provides a full-screen facility for defining and positioning fields, labels and attributes as they would be for 3270 displays. CICS Option also now provides concurrent support for both ASCII and EBCDIC data within the same system. Out now, it’s $1,250.
