Micro Focus announces availability of server expressô remote development option

Micro Focus has announced Micro Focus
Server Express Remote Development Option (RDO), a new development
environment option for its industry-leading development platform that
helps slash time and costs for companies building or maintaining
Micro Focus COBOL applications for deployment on UNIX and Linux
servers.

Using Micro Focus Server Express RDO,
customers can now remotely develop, debug and test core COBOL
applications in a powerful Eclipse Integrated Development Environment
(IDE). This eliminates expensive and tedious manual development
processes and frees up valuable IT resources. The new solution
enables customers to keep COBOL programs and the source-code on the
target server, removing the costly and time-consuming need to
transfer code between the development environment and the UNIX or
Linux server on which the application will be tested and run.

“Micro Focus Server Express Remote
Development Option is the first COBOL development tool to enable
developers to create and maintain applications on a remote server
while sitting on a local machine,” said Peter Anderton,
Director-Product Solutions, Application Development, Micro Focus.
“Development projects that once took several days to complete can
now be finished in mere hours, with customers seeing tenfold
productivity gains in the development process. This allows customers
to greatly reduce costs and enables IT staffs to redeploy personnel
for more strategic initiatives. At the same time, RDO brings
customers one step closer to developing applications remotely for
deployment directly on the cloud,” he added.

Micro Focus Server Express RDO combines
a high-performance workstation-based IDE with support for the entire
edit-compile-debug cycle on Linux or UNIX servers. It features
standard Eclipse functionality so Eclipse developers can immediately
take advantage of the solution while enabling non-COBOL developers to
quickly develop and modernize existing COBOL assets on UNIX or Linux
servers.

“It is critical that organizations
debug and test applications in an environment that is as close to
production as possible. In the past, this has meant sacrificing
powerful tools when that platform was UNIX or Linux,” added
Anderton. “Micro Focus Server Express RDO solves this problem, and
developers become instantly more productive as programs stay on the
target server, using local databases and services, while the Eclipse
IDE provides a state-of-the-art developer tool set,” continued
Anderton.

The Server Express RDO solution
includes a set of lightweight client plug-ins for Eclipse that
communicate with the Remote Development Server (RDS). The RDS uses
the COBOL server and Server Express functionality to execute builds
and provide debug services while source code remains on the server,
accessed via the Eclipse IDE. Server Express RDO uses a single
application interface throughout the edit-compile-debug process,
eliminating the requirement of learning to navigate multiple
interfaces.