isCOBOL Evolve

Release highlights

• isCOBOL IDE is now based on Eclipse Mars 4.5
• Enhanced entry field controls, with bitmaps and spell checking
• Improved List-box control with data export
• Support for tray icons across supported operating systems
• Framework improvements
• isCOBOL Server and administrator panel enhancements

isCOBOL IDE

This release of isCOBOL Evolve sports a new IDE based on Eclipse Mars 4.5, which brings new features in the hands of isCOBOL developers, such as a Terminal Emulation built in the IDE, a new dark theme, split view of a single source file, Git support for source code versioning, easier code navigation with meta-character filtering of the views, and much more!

Eclipse's local history is now extended to support screen, report painter and file designer files.

Enhanced entry field controls

Entry field controls have been greatly enhanced, and now support bitmaps inside the entry field. Bitmaps can be placed on the left or right edge of the control, or both. Click and double-click events can be intercepted to implement custom behaviour for user interaction with programs.
Brand new is also the spell checking with suggestions support for entry fields, enhancing isCOBOL software user experience.

Enhanced List-box control

The list-box control now supports easy multi selections using check-boxes, that can be activated and customized easily by setting a few properties on the control.
List-box content can be copied to the system clipboard, and can be exported in Microsoft Excel XLS and XLSX formats. This feature can be added programmatically.

System tray icon

isCOBOL applications can now add icons to the Operating System Tray area. The W$MENU system library has a new op-code, WMENU-NEW-TRAY, to manage multiplatform system tray icons.
The icon can respond to left and double clicks, which are sent to the current ACCEPT statement, and can display a context menu when right-clicked.
A tooltip can also be added to the icon, and menu items can be added dynamically.

Library routines

New routines are now available to enhance and simplify User Interface handling.
W$SAVE-IMAGE saves a bitmap-handle to a disk file.
W$HINT shows hints programmatically. Hints can also have a different hide-timeout than the default one set from configuration.
W$PROGRESSDIALOG easily shows a progress dialog with determinate or indeterminate percentage indicator
W$CENTER_WINDOW centers a window in the screen without needing any calculation from code

isCOBOL Framework

CtreeJ is a new interface for C-TreeRTG, and is now qualified to be used in heavy multi-threaded environments, with performance improvements of Client/Server architectures of up to 50% on read statements and 20% on write statements compared with other interfaces for c-treeRTG.
The new isSort command line utility and C$SORT routines can be used to sort, merge and filter indexed, relative and sequential files, and are available from the command line or using COBOL CALL statements.

isCOBOL Compiler Enhancements

isCOBOL Evolve 2017 R1 includes several changes to the compiler that improve productivity and simplify migration from other COBOLs.
Recompiling programs with isCOBOL Evolve 2017 R1 creates more optimized classes that use less memory and provide faster class-loading times. This optimization is enabled by default, no options required.
An additional compiler option, –oe, has been added to optimize the java code for the EVALUATE statement with string literals. This takes advantage of the Java statement “switch” on Strings, supported by JDK 1.7.
A new compiler option, -whttp, generate warnings when compiling code with unsupported statements under isCOBOL EIS html based solutions, useful when developing isCOBOL Mobile applications.

Compatibility with other COBOLs has been enhanced adding the WAIT LOCK clause in READ statements. The clause is currently implemented in JIsam and C-tree interfaces, to fully support Micro Focus COBOL syntax.
A new compiler option, -crlk, has been implemented to emulate the RM-COBOL style lock modes, whose behavior depends on DECLARATIVES for specific files.

isCOBOL Server improvements

isCOBOL Server can now be configured to start additional JVM processes on the server side when receiving connection requests, the administrator panel has been enhanced, and client TCP/IP traffic on common statements has been reduced up to 50%, enhancing performance.
Using separate JVM processes for each thin-client proves useful when multiple developers are debugging applications on the isCOBOL Server, by isolating each instance.
The spawing of new a JVM can be configured for each connecting client, or on clients connecting in debug mode only.
Java options can now be passed to the new processes by setting the new configuration iscobol.jvm_options.

The administration panel of isCOBOL Server has a new Threads View, which show the CPU usage of all isCOBOL Server threads, and can show the list of running threads for each TID and the COBOL stack trace of each thread.

isCOBOL EIS improvements

The compiler can now generate client programs for web services (REST or SOAP) that can be used in a COBOL or Java context. While generating the service bridge program, the compiler can now also generate a client Bean for easy web service testing, for example from a JavaServer Page (JSP).
Http requests and responses handled by the HTTPHandler class can now be logged with new configuration options allowing logs to be generated for every SOAP service calls, of for specific methods only.