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IBM Developer for z/OS 16.0.0 is now available!

  
At the beginning of last week, I posted Oh look! IDz 16.0.0 and IDz EE 16.0.0 and ADFz 4.0.0 announcements! 
wherein I proclaimed IDz 16.0.0, IDz EE 16.0.0, and ADFz 4.0.0 would be available on October 14, 2022.

It is now October 14, 2022.

IDz 16.0.0, IDz EE 16.0.0, and ADFz 4.0.0 are now downloadable!













( This is the new IDz 16.0 loading screen.)

But there is more...


20th Anniversary IBM Developer for z/OS


As a coincidence, today is (unofficially) National Dessert Day in the United States, too. It's true, look it up!
cupcake 

How to get IDz 16.0.0

The downloads, as always, are through the Aqua site Mainframe Downloads and you can get a summary of the products on the platform via the Product Listings pages.
Also notice that we have a new Aqua 3.3 Introduction page. 
IDz 16.0.0 in Aqua 3.3 pages

Documentation

The IDz 16.0 documentation has the What's New in IDz 16.0.0 where you can find out all of the details.  Remember to also check out the new IBM Documentation Offline, it allows you to host within an intranet or view the product documentation on your desktop without an internet connection. The IDz documentation packages are now available publicly for downloading and using the documentation offline. Download links for documentation packages are available on the table of contents for each version of IDz documentation. 
IDz 16.0.0 offline documentation steps to install

IDz and Aqua

First, a refresher from the previous post; the new IDz 16.0.0 client runs on the new Aqua 3.3 based on Eclipse 4.23 IDE (2022-03) and running on the IBM Semeru Java 11 JDK for Windows and MacOS x64, to allow you to write Java 11 applications that will run on z/OS as-is. Eclipse has made many improvements in the user interface and responsiveness, and also added Minimap, large file editor associations, and code mining to the editor. 

There have been a lot of improvements to Eclipse Platform as an IDE and other projects as well, so we updated those underlying components for our technology stack. We know this is a big step from the Eclipse 4.8 and Java 8 based Aqua 3.2, so we will be highlighting some other bells and whistles in other posts over time. 

Last time I talked about Minimaps, so this time I would like to show the other two I just mentioned.
The Large File Associations preference page, under General > Editors, is where you can associate different editors based on the size of a file. 
 
Code mining (General > Editors > Text Editors preference Show code minings for problem annotations) provides inline problem notices, so you can easy see where the issues are in the code.

EGit

EGit and JGit are now at version 6.1 in IDz 16.0.0 and have the SSH Agent, a Commit & Push option in Staging View, Push-to-upstream, and fetch pull / merge requests. This is in addition to performance, UI, and Dark mode improvements from the EGit and JGit 6.1 and other releases after 5.13.

Wild Web Developer

This release we are introducing Wild Web Developer (WWD) from the Eclipse IDE into the IDz 16.0.0 product.
Wild Web Developer (WWD) is an Eclipse project, based on the Eclipse Generic Editor framework, that provides a great editing experience for web and deployment files like JSON and YAML. 
Editing JSON file from zAppBuild in IDz 16.0.0 with Wild web DeveloperThis example shows editing the sample userBuildDependencyFile schema.json file from zAppBuild with folding and assist and syntax coloring alongside the outline and Minimap which is definitely a step up for the default editing experience.

Eclipse cheat sheets

I already talked about the IDz 16.0.0 moving from the Getting started to Eclipse cheat sheets in my IDz 16.0 announcement post so I will just reiterate on what a great experience having inline step by step tutorials and instructions provides, and encourage you to check it out yourself.

IBM Db2 for z/OS Database Tooling

The new IBM Db2 for z/OS Database Tooling is integrated directly into IDz 16.0.0 from the start, so there is no extra installation steps; grab the IDz 16.0.0 download and you have it waiting for you to setup.
Remember the cheat sheets I mentioned earlier, because the Db2 for z/OS tooling has cheat sheets, and they make this first experience easy!
I covered the cheat sheets and the new Db2 for z/OS tooling more in the previous post about the announce and I expect another blog post soon with even more details.

In summary, the new tooling enables you to:

    • Execute SQL statements from COBOL and PL/I programs.
    • Use SQL Tuning Services.
    • Run Visual Explain, Statistics Advisor and Capture Query Environment.
    • Validate schema, table, and column names in EXEC SQL statements against a database catalog.
 

Remote Connection Emulator (RCE)

The host emulation technology in IDz 16.0.0 has completely moved to the Remote Connection Emulator (RCE).

For IDz 16.0.0, the capabilities and the platforms have expanded with MacOS support available, and 3279 emulation now supported.

Some of the key features in RCE include the coloring, font selection, secondary keyboard, crosshairs, keyboard remapping, and easy to access controls.

I cover a lot of these other features in a previous post from last year, so I won't reiterate those, but I don't think I mentioned cloning sessions so let me show off that clones can be opened in different windows, stay as tabs, or put side by side, and have their own session files.
 

Notices and Limitations

I wanted to make sure to state some notices and limitations for the IDz 16.0 first release version, and to note that these limitations are release version specific.
    • Platform
      • For IDz 16.0.0, IBM Installation Manager installation is not supported at this time. You will need to use the P2 install.
      • For IDz 16.0.0, there is currently no Linux version supported.
      • This release requires a new install; you can not upgrade or update an IDz 14.x or 15.x install to get a working IDz 16.0.0.
    • Workspace Migration to IDz 16.0.0 from previous releases.
      • If you migrate a Workspace, you may see things like icons as red Xs or otherwise missing, errors for existing configurations of perspectives or editors or views that you had up: these aren't actually a big issue, just close those editors or views and reopen them, and reset your perspectives, to have these go away.  this is caused by editor class names changing, better high-resolution icons, and other updates that the old workspace has cached based  on the last state.
      • If you migrate a Workspace, you need to have any plugins or other applications shared in that previous install also installed or you may see errors.
    • Aqua 3.3 ecosystem
      • Please pay attention to the products that are supported on the Aqua 3.3 platform and installation via P2 install. If they don't explicitly state they are on the platform, they are not supporting shell sharing and Aqua 3.3 at this time.
        • For example, there is no supported production version of IBM Enterprise Workflow Management (EWM) that is supported on IDz 16.0.0 at this time.  
          • Because there is no IBM Enterprise Workflow Management (EWM) that is supported on the Aqua 3.3 platform currently, that also means that there is not an EWM Integration for z/OS install at this time.
      • Note also that third party plugins also need to support running on Eclipse 4.23 (2022-03) and running on Java 11 in order to install on IDz 16.0.0, so you may need to find different versions of your current external plugins and shell-sharing applications, if they are available.
    • Technology
      • There is no current capability to record or play macros in the Remote Connection Emulator for IDz 16.0.0.
    • IDz 16.0.0 host
      • For IDz 16.0.0 on the host, for today, Java 8 is the expected runtime. 

More Blog Posts!

There are more blogs to follow, so would recommend also reading these other posts for more 16.0.0-related information!

Also remember the upcoming webinar Developer experience for hybrid applications on IBM Z Systems on October 27!