Dave Nicolette's Modern Mainframes for 2021

About the Talk

Since the late 1980s, much of the world outside of mainframe data centers has ignored the mainframe platform. Conventional wisdom was that it would soon cease to exist.

Today, the mainframe is positioned as a viable and cost-effective cloud infrastructure platform, while still supporting its traditional role in core business systems for large enterprises.

IBM's modernization strategy for the mainframe, currently branded as the Z system, has included enhancements to the hardware architecture, the logical architecture, connectivity with other systems, support for contemporary operating systems, languages, and frameworks, and tightening up compile-time checking in Cobol for issues that may cause runtime errors.

Modernization also involves the development of development tools, including IDEs, editors that support refactoring, debuggers, testing frameworks, and smart data transfer facilities between Z systems and off-platform developer environments. Significantly, IBM has embraced Open Source with transparency and enthusiasm.

Let's take a look at some of the contemporary development tools we can use to work on mainframe applications. It's quite a different world from the old 3270 green screen environment.

We'll also consider differences between the two worlds - the mainframe world and the "distributed" world (everything that isn't a mainframe). Business risks, typical types of applications, and developer culture differ between the two. A convergence between the two populations of developers would help both worlds - improving robustness, security, and stability in distributed systems, and improving development and test automation practices in mainframe systems.

About Dave

Dave Nicolette started his career in IT as a mainframe developer in 1977 and continued to focus on that platform until around 1992, when he shifted focus to Unix and emerging technologies. He has worked in a variety of roles in several industries. He became interested in the Agile movement in 2002, and became an agile coach in 2006. Recently he has become interested in bringing contemporary development practices back "home" to the mainframe world.

Dave has written a Cobol Unit Test Framework for the mainframe and is a prolific author of both books and blog posts all available at his website http://neopragma.com .

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