Overview of Using Studio Enterprise Edition for UNIX

The main menu shows the functions main functions available. The menu is displayed at the bottom of the screen, and shows you which key to press to invoke the function you want. One feature not accessed in this way is the Interface Mapping Toolkit, which has its own separate development environment with a graphical user interface.

The process of developing a program in Studio Enterprise Edition for UNIX is broadly:

1. Central to the system is the COBOL Editor. You enter this from the menu, and use it to create or change your program and save it in a source file.
2. When you have created your source program, you can invoke the Compiler from within the COBOL Editor to check that the program is valid COBOL. When the Compiler finds a syntax error, you can return at once to the COBOL Editor. The cursor is automatically positioned at the line containing the error. You correct the error and invoke the Compiler again.
3. When the program checks with no errors, you run, debug and test it using Animator, which you can also invoke from within the COBOL Editor. Animator enables you to watch and control the working of your program, seen entirely as COBOL source, and therefore makes testing and debugging very efficient.
4. If you find an error while testing, you can return at once to the COBOL Editor. The cursor is automatically positioned at the line you were looking at when you found the error. You correct the error and invoke the Compiler and Animator again. Alternatively, you can enter the Compiler and Animator directly from the menu after you have exited from the COBOL Editor.
5. When your program is working correctly, you can run it using the Run function on the main menu. Any subprograms and run-time support modules that it needs are automatically loaded as necessary.
6. You can use Animator on programs that have been compiled or linked to any of the formats supported by Studio Enterprise Edition for UNIX: intermediate code, generated code, callable shared object code or system executable code. The ability of Animator to debug all supported executable formats means that you can debug programs at any stage of the application development cycle.
7. When your application is working correctly you might want to optimize it and ship it to your users.

   The Compiler's syntax check phase produces intermediate code; this is a Micro Focus proprietary code, contained in a file with a filename extension of .int, which can be interpreted by Animator and the Run function. If you want faster execution, you can create optimized object code in two native machine code formats:

   • Generated code, contained in a file with a filename extension .gnt
   • Callable shared object code, contained in a file with the extension .so

   You can run files in both formats in the same way as intermediate code.

   You can create generated code or callable shared objects using the menus, or by using the cob command. You can also create an executable file by creating native machine code, with the filename extension .o, and then linking this with the run-time support files to create a system executable file (which usually has no extension and is known as an a.out file). This executable file can call .so, .int and .gnt files if required.

   Shipping components of this system to users is subject to a license agreement. See Deployment Licensing for details.