What's new in IBM Developer for z/OS on VS Code

The release of IBM Z® Open Editor and RSE API Plugin for Zowe™ CLI focuses entirely on various enhancements and bug fixes.

• Added the ability to run a preprocessor for COBOL or PL/I for files that you edit locally on z/OS®. You can now continue to use preprocessor that runs on Z for the Git files. Also, added the ability with the release, see Remote preprocessor and created a new tutorial page in these docs.

• You can now use regular expressions to search file names and file content in the z/OS Resources table for both data sets and UNIX files. See Search toggles.

• Reimplemented the way COBOL and PL/I language servers parse code with double-byte characters. You can now convert code back to EBCDIC in memory to correctly count the byte length of strings. The byte counter returns to the status bar and shows how many bytes you use on the current line.

• Added the popular Expand Source Code operation to JCL files.

• Several language-related issues are now fixed.

• Improved how credentials are cached and reused to get fewer login prompts on the Zowe Explorer and CLI side when you do not store them with a credentials manager, such as when you work on Red Hat® OpenShift Dev Spaces. Fixed several RSE API issues that occur when you save a locked files.

New installations of Z Open Editor now includes a 90-day trial for Advanced Features. You can install all entitled VS Code extensions from the Mainframe download site.

These packs and the download zip files on the Mainframe Download site now includes the IBM CICS® for Zowe Explorer VS Code extension and the IBM CICS Plug-in for Zowe CLI. The ADFz pack and zip also include the IBM File Manager for z/OS VS Code extension and IBM Fault Analyzer for z/OS VS Code extension. See Mainframe Downloads.

Alternatively, you can also download the new extension packs published in the VS Code Marketplace and Open-VSX.

• IBM Developer for z/OS on VS Code (IDzEE) and

• IBM Application Delivery Foundation for z/OS (ADFz)

See the complete list of enhancements and bug fixes in the changelog here.

Released Z Open Editor and RSE API Plugin for Zowe™ CLI 5.3.0, which enhances the JCL editor with PROCs support, adds new commands to the RSE API CLI, and fixes various bugs.

IBM Z® Open Editor is part of the IBM Developer for z/OS Enterprise Edition and IBM Application Delivery Foundation for z/OS product offerings. Throughout the last year, shipped new and improved added-value capabilities in each of the monthly releases on top of the free Z Open Editor, which addressed the needs of the enterprise customers based on their feedback. In 5.3.0 release, another exciting new capability was added to the paid-for variant of the VS Code solution portfolio: the ability to run an advanced green screen emulator directly out of Z Open Editor. The emulator called RCE (Remote Connection Emulator) provides many features which include a fully customizable user experience, advanced text selection features for cut or copy or paste, a customizable screen keyboard, bidirectional editing, and many other features. The emulator is scalable by running as a web server on your Remote System Explorer API server, runs in a browser, and you can authenticate with your regular Zowe RSE API profile that you use when you work with Zowe Explorer. So, it is a simple right-click in Zowe Explorer to open a remote connection session on any of your z/OS® systems that run RSE API server version 1.2.1 or newer. See Advanced RCE.

Furthermore, added improvements to the RSE API and Z Open Editor integration by adding paging features to the z/OS Resources table. When you review large numbers of data sets or lists of data set members, you can page through a configurable number of elements at the time, speed up the user experience, retrieve the results only one page at the time from the server.

The first release of 2025 focuses on quality of service improvements and bug fixes. Improved the advanced features list by adding support for custom HLASM macros stored in z/OS data sets. Optimized how Z Open Editor's utilize Zowe Explorer's new virtual file system even further and added a progress bar when you load many include files from a remote location. You no longer have to monitor the log file to see if everything is loaded successfully, instead the status bar tells you how many files it still needs to load together with a cancel button that enables you to stop the whole process. Be sure to tweak the parallel downloads setting to optimize for your specific setup. Based on a popular request a new user setting is added that enables you to start a user build on arbitrary files through right-click together with several fixes.

On the Zowe™ Explorer with RSE API side, a new warning dialog is added to prepare you for password expiration. Support for cross-LPAR operations continues with all new RSE API CLI commands.

Finally, documentation is revised to run the tools in Red Hat® OpenShift Dev Spaces and GitHub Codespaces with Dev Containers.

With the availability of version 5.1.0 of Z Open Editor, the transition is complete to Zowe™ v3 by fully adopting the virtual file system introduced with Zowe Explorer v3. When you open a program that has copybooks or include files, and if those files are fetched from MVS through a ZAPP property group, use the same mechanism as Zowe Explorer to store them as the exact virtual resource. It does not matter if the file is opened directly through Zowe Explorer's Date Set View, or Z Open Editor's copybooks resolution and a ctrl or cmd-click on the underlined file reference, or through our advanced z/OS® Resource table: you see the same virtual file resource name in the VS Code editor tab. Unify the file resources, this enables the ability to edit the copybooks and save changes back to MVS. By default such files open as ready-only to avoid confusion introducing this feature and accidental code changes, but with the new user setting "zopeneditor.zowe": {"readonlyRemoteIncludeFiles": "<true-or-false>"} you can enable that the files are editable and can be written back to MVS. When you work on these new features, also revisit the "zopeneditor.zowe": {"listBeforeDownload": "<true-or-false>"} setting and refine the checks performed for the existence of a data set member before you try to download it, because 404 errors are not handled well by z/OSMF.

The release also adds a key feature to the advanced PL/I preprocessor to support developers using PL/I Macros in their code. Provided a new REXX program sample that the preprocessor feature can execute on z/OS® to use the PL/I compiler to expand the macros and send the results back to the PL/I language server. PL/I developer can use this feature to eliminate the syntax errors they saw in the past when you edit code with macros, as the parser does not yet have support for these statements. The preprocessor uses the expanded source code to show how macros were expanded in rich hovers inside the program editor as well as a side-by-side view. Continue to edit your program without syntax errors and regenerate the expanded macro representation and refresh the hovers on save. Added an article about the preprocessor support to the Team Blog section under COBOL and PL/I preprocessor support by IBM Z® Open Editor.

For the IBM® RSE API Plugin for Zowe CLI, added several exciting new commands and options. One focus area is new cross-LPAR commands and new parameters for paging results, such as for long list of data set members.

The release also marks the start of a new generation of Cloud-based editing support for the platform. Retired the OpenShift Dev Spaces clone Wazi for Dev Spaces in favor to support Red Hat's OpenShift Dev Spaces directly. This enables you to immediately be on the latest version of OpenShift and Dev Spaces and use the same platform as their distributed development counterparts, facilitates the break down of solos and the creation of hybrid application development teams that maintain container-based and mainframe-based solution together.

Version 5 of Z Open Editor and the RSE API Plugin for Zowe™ CLI are now available on the VS Code Marketplace, Open-VSX, npmjs.com, Mainframe Downloads. The most important update is the switch to Zowe v3, which means Zowe Explorer 3.0.2 and Zowe CLI 8.x. These two, or newer versions, are now required as the previous versions 2.x of Zowe Explorer and CLI 7.x that does not work with this 5.0.0 release.

The other two breaking changes that triggered a major version number update for the release are

• VS Code 1.91 or newer version is now required to switch to the latest language server APIs in VS Code to utilize features that were added to the protocol.

• Java 17™ or newer version is also required for these language server updates and the release nicely coincides with IBM® Developer for z/OS® 17 that has also switched to Java 17 as its runtime. If you are on an older version of Java, Z Open Editor does not activate and the Welcome page informs you to upgrade.

The release is coordinated with the paid-for products IBM Application Delivery Foundation for z/OS 5.0.0 and IBM Developer for z/OS Enterprise Edition 17.0.0 that include Z Open Editor with technical support and the Advanced Capabilities. The packaging of the VS Code components included in these products have been renamed from "IBM Wazi for VS Code" to "IBM Developer for z/OS on VS Code". These offerings also provide the IBM Z Open Debug extension, Dependency Based Build version 3, with its all-new zBuilder framework, and Wazi Deploy. Also note, early versions of the IBM Fault Analyzer and File Manager VS Code extensions are soon to be added to the ADFz offering as well.

Other release highlights for 5.0.0 are

• Localization and globalization of Z Open Editor and Zowe Explorer to French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish. See Switch the display language.

• Improved support for editing programs with double-byte characters including fixes for incorrectly reported syntax errors when such characters are used in a line of code. See Specifying an EBCDIC file encoding to use with the language servers.

• Support to perform user builds with IBM DBB 3.0.0 zBuilder. See Advanced problems view, Building z/OS applications with the zBuilder.

• JCL include file support plus many enhancements and fixes for the latest language server. See Setting property groups

• New RSE API Plugin for Zowe CLI commands and many fixes.

Breaking changes:

• Java 17: Built the language server with Java 17, which now is the minimum Java version required for Z Open Editor. The editor does not work with Java 11 anymore. We recommend IBM's Semeru Runtime or JDK. Distributions from Oracle and OpenJDK also works.

• VS Code v1.91 or newer: As part of the upgrade to Java 17, you can use newer versions of language server APIs provided by the Eclipse LSP4J project and Microsoft. As a result, the required version for VS Code for the extension to v1.91 or newer is also increased.

• Zowe v3: Zowe Explorer 3.0.0 or newer is now required. Z Open Editor v5 now downloads and installs Zowe Explorer v3. Zowe Explorer v2 does not work anymore. For IBM RSE API Plugin for Zowe CLI the requirement is now Zowe CLI v8.

New features and fixes:

• Localization: Z Open Editor and Zowe Explorer are now available for the VS Code display languages French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish. This also includes syntax error messages provided by the COBOL, PL/I, JCL and REXX language servers. Download the respective language pack and switch.

• Added user settings to enable or disable folding range support for JCL and COBOL.

For the September 2024 release, reached a major milestone for completing the z/OS® Resource Table and summarizing all the new capabilities in a new Blog post. In particular, completed the Search capabilities for the table by adding content search for PDS members as well as UNIX System Services files.

The second advanced feature that got significant enhancements is the preprocessor support, which is extended to also work with PL/I programs. The samples repository provides preprocessor examples in Java™ and REXX for both target languages as well.

On the free features side, added a new experimental content menu action to expand a COBOL program embedding all the nested copybooks and substituting REPLACING values. The feature is not yet complete to cover conditional compilation, but looking forward to your feedback.

Finally, added new commands and options to the RSE API Plugin for Zowe™ CLI, such as copying content between LPARs, new encoding conversion options, as well as performance tweaks.

August 2024 release of Z Open Editor and RSE API Plugin focuses on incremental refinements and fixes. Added many improvements to Advanced Capabilities such as the following:

• z/OS® Resources Tables, which now features content search and new filter options.

• The Preprocessor support, which now adds support for z/OSMF, a Cancel button, as well as many fixes and small refinements.

• As another highlight, HLASM editor is extended to support code completion for local macros, which shows you all the macros parameters that enables you to use the tab key to navigate from parameter to parameter to fill in the values. For operations, the code completion mechanism is now utilized for syntax errors. See Code completion

For the free content, the language support issues for PL/I, HLASM, as well as the all new JCL language server is fixed. For COBOL, added a first implementation of a long requested feature: code folding. Improvements made to the RSE API Plugin for Zowe CLI by adding a new command for UNIX System Services and finally providing an installation option for air gap that is to install the plugin without access to the public internet.

IBM Z® Open Editor 4.3.0 is now available, adds support for another language: Job Control Language (JCL). The new language server is a first increment that provides most frequently requested features such as an Outline view, real-time syntax checking, and code completion. Planning to add more capabilities in the future and look forward to your feedback.

In addition to this free new language feature, also adding to the advanced capabilities for the IDzEE or ADFz audience by completing the preprocessor story with remote preprocessor execution. Run a custom preprocessor on z/OS®, perhaps implemented in REXX, using a TSO command that reads a program file in a data set to produce a processed output file to be used by the COBOL language server to edit the program with the preprocessor statements.

Improved the language support addressing changes for the latest PL/I v6.1 January 2024 compiler refresh, fixed bugs reported by the community, and added minor enhancements requested by customers, such as an improved support to edit strings with double-byte characters to avoid truncation issues

Released Z Open Editor and RSE API CLI plugin 4.2.0 with two more additions to the Advanced Features set:

1. Added a brand new capability for HLASM developers to work with macro files showing hovers, document links, go to definition, and code completion for macros provided in local files.

2. Updated the z/OS® Resource table with UNIX System Services support to provide you with the same capabilities to browse, filter, sort, open, download, upload, create, and copy your unix folders and files with the same user experience that was added in the 4.0.0 release for MVS and JES.

In addition to the usual bug fixes and refinements, also added COBOL User Defined Functions support to Z Open Editor as well as enhancements and fixes for the watsonx® Code Assistant for Z integration.

After the major v4.0.0 update that focused on adding advanced features to Z Open Editor, released v4.1.0 with key updates for the watsonx® Code Assistant for Z integration and the RSE API Plugin for Zowe™ CLI.

Added a graphical end-to-end walkthrough on how to get started and set up the Code Assistant's Transform features in Z Open Editor. Also, added new ways to navigate from the generated Java™ code back to the COBOL sources using a VS Code CodeLens. Plus, fixed various bugs and issued reported by the watsonx users.

For the Zowe CLI plugin, added powerful new commands to perform content search on the UNIX System Services files. The CLI also introduces new command to a special RSE API to store key-value pairs. RSE provides this mini key-value database feature that any system programmer or developer can use for their own purposes. You can store configuration information for private use in personal automation scripts or provide data to shared scripts across your team.

Released a major update to Z Open Editor. In addition to featuring support for all the latest COBOL, PL/I, CICS, and HLASM languages refresh releases for z/OS® 3.1, many RSE API enhancements, IBM Z® Open Editor v4.0.0 is now the first release to introduce a set of all-new enterprise-level advanced capabilities. While the core Z Open Editor continues to provide full language support for COBOL, PL/I, REXX, and HLASM for free, the release adds capabilities for enterprise-level development use cases that go beyond program editing. They cover capabilities that you typically find only in the commercial editing solutions such as IBM® Developer for z/OS® Enterprise Edition (IDzEE). With the release, started to add these capabilities to Z Open Editor under the same licensing terms as IDzEE and a 60-day evaluation license. IDzEE customers can unlock the features by using RSE API or separately distributed activation kits. For more information, see the IBM Developer for z/OS Documentation.

To emphasize, none of the other features that you were using in previous releases are impacted by the update. Previous features are still available for free and is still maintained and enhanced as always. We are also still fully committed to support z/OSMF and RSE API for the free as well as advanced capabilities.

Only the following three new features require a license. The goal is to provide more and more advanced features such as these to Z Open Editor in the future:

1. Local preprocessor support for COBOL: run a preprocessor on your local workstation driven by a new ZAPP profile type and then continue to edit with full syntax checks (except for the preprocessor statements) and automatically rerun the preprocessor at save. Compare the preprocessor-generated code with your code side-by-side. Support to run the preprocessor on z/OS® is to be added in a future release.

2. z/OS Resources table: an all-new feature rich view that extends Zowe Explorer with a sortable table. Gain insights into your jobs and data sets by listing, filtering, and sorting on many available properties.

3. Advanced Dependency Based user build error reporting: User build logs are now automatically downloaded, parsed, and presented in the editor's Problems view with descriptions and error codes. Navigate to errors in your code with a mouse, click on the Problems view to review and fix your issue and then rerun your build.

See the Advanced Capabilities section in the documents for a complete overview of these new capabilities.

As this is a major version release, upgraded some of the dependencies that require newer versions of VS Code (1.81.0), Zowe CLI (7.21.3), and Zowe Explorer (2.14.1).

Also check out the completely redesigned IBM Z® Open Debug v4.0.0 VS Code extension. It is now using Zowe CLI profiles as well and provides an all-new Zowe Explorer inspired Debugger Profile view for a seamless integration of the IBM® z/OS® Debugger into the Z Open Editor or Zowe Explorer-based user experience.