Session title: The zGui (r)evolution – First hands on experience and best practices
Session abstract: The evolution of the mainframe had a variety of GUI approaches, some lasted for a while, some never took off at all. However, it was never THE COMMON ecosystem used by all products and all vendors. At the 2018 SHARE, IBM, Rocket Software and CA Technologies announced ZOWE – THE z ecosystem to securely manage, control, script and develop. Of course, an announcement is probably not the final truth, but from what I’ve already seen and used I’m more than enthused. This presentation shows you the basics you need to understand ZOWE, summarizes the steps you need to use it and illustrates how ISPF online and batch applications are supported from the GUI world.
For a couple of years, the importance of a GUI has seemed to grow significantly and it may be one of the most important factors if the z platform is to remain strategic over the next decade and beyond – probably less because of the potential benefit of a specific GUI implementation, but because of the simple fact that recent generations of DBAs, SYSPROGS, and Programmers aren’t that familiar with our beloved green screen than those who were working with ISPF for decades. DS, RDz, DSM, z/OSMF -to name just IBMs recent ones- always had a common downside, which I believe customers didn’t like at all: Users were not able to interface all mainframe products from, and through, a common interface. Bottom line: We need a GUI that not only comes with a monitoring dashboard, job submission capabilities, including a JES explorer, data set explorer and editor, scripting for automation and interaction with all major product, like CICS, Db2, BUT it should be used by ALL vendors! Of course, this GUI should seamlessly integrate into all those robust security and resource management components we’re already familiar with. It needs to be the preferred interface for administrative tasks, development, test, and operation, no matter if using old applications, or brand-new ones. Is that too much I’m asking for? ZOWE – THE z ecosystem to securely manage, control, script and develop – seems to be the way to go. It comes with a RESTful API, an extensible command line interface and a HTML 5 web-based UI framework designed to fusion everything we already have with anything we want to do today and tomorrow. It is exactly what many of us were asking for for years. We see a clear commitment from some of the most important companies in the mainframe world and we also see the technical components required to do our daily work and open up new opportunities for tomorrows modern apps. All well integrated into RLF, SAF and USS and interfacing with MVS, Db2 , CICS, JES as well as products from a variety of other vendors – and by the way, it’s EPL-2.0 (Eclipse Public License). End of 2018 our company strategically decided to build UIs based on the ZOWE ecosystem. Learn how you can quickly define entire workflows as well as interacting with and controlling them based on a Db2 z/OS cloning example along with workload capture and replay in a simulation environment – fully automated quality assurance as part of continuous delivery in an agile world.
Speaker biography: Ulf Heinrich is the Director of Solutions Delivery at SOFTWARE ENGINEERING GmbH. He specializes in Db2 operations and performance tuning, focusing on the growing requirement for cost reduction and 24×7 operations. As a consultant at large customer sites, he has implemented database maintenance procedures and recovery strategies, and also experienced the pitfalls of recovery scenarios under realworld recovery pressure. His activities cover EMEA, as well as North America through SE’s U.S. subsidiary, SEGUS Inc. As a member of SE’s Request Board he’s working closely with customers and the development labs.