SoftLanding Contributes New WDSc Utilities to Open Source

Published: June 27, 2006

by Alex Woodie

iSeries change management vendor SoftLanding Systems last week unveiled three utilities designed to make life a little easier for developers working within WebSphere Developer Studio Client (WDSc). The utilities, part of SoftLanding's Remote Systems Explorer (RSE) Extensions project, include a graphical code analysis tool, a dialog for editing data areas, and a tool that displays data queues. As it has done with other RSE Extensions products, SoftLanding has made them available to all iSeries programmers free of charge under an open source license.

SoftLanding has been contributing to the open source software community since 2005, when the company ported the open source Subversion change management program to OS/400 and released two products that help iSeries shops manage their Java, PC, and Web development. These include Subversion for OS/400, a stand-alone source control package that is available free of charge, and the for-fee TurnOverSVN, which connects directly into SoftLanding's flagship TurnOver suite of change management tools for traditional RPG and COBOL development.

Last September, SoftLanding made another contribution to the open-source community when it released RSE Extensions. The first iteration of RSE Extensions introduced some handy tools for developers working within WDSc and RSE, including direct access to spooled file output from within WDSc, the capability to monitor iSeries message queues, and a pre-arranged collection of views that makes it easier to view two source-editing windows simultaneously.

Now the company is bulking up its RSE Extensions toolset with three additional tools to assist in debugging, development, and code analysis. The new graphical source code comparison engine should draw a lot of new fans, according to Mark Phippard, director of development at SoftLanding.

"Eclipse provides very powerful compare/merge options for Java code, and native iSeries developers wanted something similar," Phippard says. "In order to meet this need, we figured out a way to apply the core functionality of the Eclipse source/compare engine to iSeries code."

The result is an RSE plug-in that allows users to compare two iSeries source members in either edit or browse mode, and to interactively merge two source members, according to SoftLanding. The company says the graphical nature of the editor should make it easy for developers to spot problems quickly, and notes that iSeries shops will be particularly pleased with the fact that the new utility works with the various source members that come from different iSeries systems.

Another new utility delivers a custom dialog that provides developers with a view of a data area's attributes, as well as the capability to edit its value. When this utility is installed on a workstation running WDSc, it gives developers the ability to see the data area's name, library, and type, by right clicking over a *DTAARA object.

Similarly, the third new tool gives uses the capability to view a data queue's attributes and to see the first entry in the queue by right-clicking on a *DTAQ object and choosing the RSE Extensions, Display Data Queue option. In a RSE Extensions-less world, developers would have to open a 5250 session to accomplish these tasks, SoftLanding says.

The new additions to the RSE Extensions marks SoftLanding's third major contribution to the open source community in just over a year. "Our goal is to provide the most up-to-date tools to help iSeries-centric shops implement unified software management practices throughout their IT organizations," says Steve Gapp, president of the Peterborough, New Hampshire, company. "We see our free plug-ins and open source initiatives as important steps to enhance the extensibility of the WDSc development platform for the entire iSeries market."

The new RSE Extensions require WDSc 6.0 and are available now as a free download following the submission of a request form on the SoftLanding Web site at www.softlanding.com/websphere/rse.htm.

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