Navigating

One of the first differences you might notice between IBM® Developer for z/OS® and ISPF is how you navigate the product. You navigate ISPF by using the keyboard to type on panels and in the command line. In Developer for z/OS you use a mouse to select menu items, controls, and items from lists and tables, and you use the keyboard for typing text.

You use these user interface objects to complete tasks.
Workspace
The top-level folder on your computer where information about all the resources that you work with is stored. It contains local z/OS projects and files and information about your remote system connections and your development preferences and settings.
Perspectives
A collection of views that relates to a specific high-level task. These perspectives are commonly used:
  • The z/OS Projects perspective provides tools for accessing remote systems, creating projects, and submitting builds. This view is relevant to z/OS COBOL, PL/I, and HLASM project work.
  • The Debug perspective enables debugging z/OS remote and local applications.
  • The Enterprise Service Tools perspective provides tools for building and testing web services.

Each perspective contains several views that provide a different function or a different way of viewing the resources that you are working with. For a description of the views in the z/OS Projects perspective, for example, see Key views.

Windows
Places to type information, select items from lists, and click controls to complete actions. Most windows open in response to selecting a menu item.
Menu bar
At the top of the workspace, the menu bar contains frequently used actions. When you click a menu, one or more actions occur.
Toolbar
At the top of the workspace just below the menu bar, the toolbar changes contents according to the active window or editor. Actions in the toolbar might apply to particular views, so these actions might be enabled or disabled according to the state of the active view or editor.
Menus
Lists of specific actions that you can do in the user interface. Most views provide menus, which you access by positioning the mouse pointer in the view and pressing the right mouse button.
Figure 1. Example of a user interface
Developer for z/OS
Note: The graphical user interface is sometimes referred to as the z/OS integrated development environment or zIDE. These two terms are used throughout the documentation.