Global software and services company, Macro 4, is introducing three new Eclipse plug-ins as part of a strategy to integrate its mainframe tools with the Eclipse IDE (Integrated Development Environment).

The new solutions, which build on the M4Workbench Eclipse framework and plug-ins announced in 2011, help developers to perform a wide range of mainframe application development and testing tasks from within Eclipse without having to directly access the mainframe environment.

The new z/Explorer for Eclipse plug-in provides an editing capability for mainframe files and allows users to submit jobs and access the JES spool to view results in the job output. An additional plug-in, M4Slickedit, offers the option of formatted smart program code editing to aid developer productivity.

As part of Macro 4’s comprehensive Eclipse development for its TraceMaster interactive testing and debugging tool, a new tracing plug-in lets users set up batch traces in Eclipse, prior to launching an integrated browser window to run the traces.

“We already supply a number of Eclipse plug-ins, including a dump analysis tool that developers can use to analyze application program faults, so with the new products – and our M4workbench Eclipse framework - we’re able to offer a broad range of functionality for Eclipse development,” explained Jim Allum, Director, Commercial and Technical.

Eclipse is a key focus area for Macro 4 because its modern graphical user interfaces (GUIs) help enhance productivity and enable familiar, ’Windows-style’ access to mainframe technology that is playing an increasingly important role in attracting a new generation of developers.