IBM Updates Application Development Life-Cycle Management Tools

The tools are designed to extend the working life of legacy applications running on most platforms by bringing those tasks into the emerging world of service-oriented architectures (SOAs).

One of the offerings, CICS Interdependency Analyzer, automatically detects runtime resource relationships in CICS mainframe systems and records the results in DB2 databases, according to IBM.

There's also a new point release of WebSphere Studio Enterprise Developer (WSED). The company said version 5.1.2 provides a common workbench and tools for application development, testing and deployment of applications whether they're relatively new J2EE applications or older, big-iron apps written in COBOL or P/I.

The fact that the toolset supports both legacy and new applications in one environment is a major plus, said Charles Stack, CEO of Flashline, a Cleveland-based ISV that builds repository and IT asset management tools for the IBM universe.

"Our application integrates with IBM's life-cycle tools. We're the repository," Stack said. "The point of this release is that it starts tying things more together [and] brings in the zSeries projects. We have a repository for companies to store their assets, and when we go into IBM customers, their assets include objects or code running on laptops to CICS transactions running on mainframes."

The WSED upgrade is available now and starts at $5,500 per server. Also on the IBM docket is CICS VSAM Recovery 3.3, designed for accessing multiple z/OS or OS/390 application sessions from a single terminal, starting at $1,372 per CPU.

IBM, the king of big iron, clearly wants to extend the life--and billing power--of those machines and counter Microsoft's contention that mainframes are going the way of the dodo bird. Elsewhere the tools front, IBM faces confusion, even among its own partners, because of a bewildering array of products that all carry the WebSphere label.