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Blog Post
COBOL and Zowe! An Open Mainframe Project webinar Q1 2024
Learn how new releases of Zowe Explorer make it easier for COBOL course learners
Cobol and Zowe go together like “peanut butter and jelly”! This exciting statement is the start of the first webinar of the COBOL Programming Course in 2024.
Adam Wolfe, the guest speaker, is the Zowe squad lead and Zowe Explorer cosquad lead. Technical Steering Committee members Mike Bauer and Sudharsana Srinivasan discuss with Adam the benefits of the new versions of Zowe Explorer that were released, making it easy for the COBOL learners of the COBOL programming course.
Mike talks about his experience with Zowe, “working with Zowe as a first foray into mainframe is a great experience, and Zowe Explorer is the easiest way to get into mainframe”.
He shares in the webinar that the adoption of the COBOL Programming Course has been increasing, with more than 22,000 course IDs issued and 120,000 Zowe Explorer downloads.
What’s new for Zowe Explorer V2?
- Sorting and filtering for jobs and PDS members
- Open files and data sets using user-specified encodings/code pages
- USS file attributes UI
- Adding/removing a profile from all trees at one time
Zowe Explorer V3 updates
- Improved file comparison
- USS tree enhancements
- Issue USS commands
- Drag and drop files and folders
- Removal of support for V1 profiles
Watch the excellent demos from Adam explaining the previous changes along with examples.
Benefits to COBOL learners
Take advantage of the new functionality in Zowe Explorer V2 and the prerelease demo of V3 when learning. Some of the benefits, like sorting jobs by date of execution, help you identify the most recent JCL, add the COBOL learner profile to all, and recognize tags for USS, which are very useful for a learner of the COBOL course.
Next steps
Zowe GitHub links provided by Mike for the audience to try out and give feedback:
- GitHub repository link for Zowe Explorer.
- Link to the specific releases.
- Preview the most recent next release of Zowe Explorer to try and provide feedback.
Make improvements to the GitHub repo of COBOL programming course from the impact of Zowe releases. Check out the last 14 minutes of the webinar for specific details.
Example :
- Getting started (Course #1): Tooling set up changes
- Learning COBOL (Course #2) : Review labs
- Advanced topics (Course #3): Solution to the challenges
- Testing (Course #4): Several opportunities to leverage OMP’s COBOL Check to include unit testing, add more CICS content, use Zowe CLI to drive automation from Jenkins, and so on.
Ready to start your COBOL journey? Dive into the COBOL programming course (GitHub repository). The course is split into 4 different sections and learners check out the PDFs to begin your journey.
Get started on your COBOL journey today! This course is also available on the IBM Digital Learning Platform and Coursera.