CA Realia vs Micro Focus Workbench
I've also used both products, and they have their good points and bad.
CA-Realia has done some good things with their product the last couple of
years. It was very weak on large file sizes, but we always found the basic
'flavor' of the product to be more comfortable for our people coming from
the mainframe environment. MicroFocus has a number of things beyond just
the COBOL portion of their product which are also quite useful, such as
communications extenders, etc. In general we have also found that more of
the product vendors who interface to development products (e.g., Oracle,
DB2, etc.) support MicroFocus directly than CA. however, the latest
versions of the MicroFocus workbench are far more difficult to set up than
the older versions (too many features...?), and our mainframe background
people have more difficulty adjusting. Our PC background people (coming
from Visual Basic, etc) seem to adjust much more easily to the Mf
Workbench.
One particular feature I found useful for test enviroments (which are often
the most difficult part of setting these things up) is that the CA-Realia
generated code allows the character set to be specified on a file-by-file
basis at run time (e.g., set one file to EBCDIC, and another to ASCII),
whereas MF only allows this to be selected for all files at compile time,
or on a file-by-file basis with embedded (and non-mainframe compliant
syntax) code. This may not sound important, but it really made a
difference for us.
Another aspect of your search is what (if any) CICS product you will use on
the PC side. We have used both the MicroFocus Transaction system, and the
IBM CICS/OS2 product (it has been several years since I got a fresh version
of the CA CICS product, so I cannot comment on that). I greatly preferred
the IBM product, as easier to set up and run. They both are able to do
about the same thing in the end, but the MF transaction system is a real
bear to get going.
Quote:
> I've been using the Realia compiler for 8+ years and the workbench for
the
> last 3. Prior to that, I tried the MF workbench.
-----------snip-------------------------
Quote:
> Overall, I do recomend Realia.
> bob root
> > Anyone out there use CA-Realia II Workbench or Micro Focus's COBOL
> > Workbench? I'd REALLY like to hear what you think of the products:
what's
> > good and what's bad about the products. I'm trying to determine which
of
> > the two products will work best for running some batch jobs written in
> > COBOL and a few CICS apps that we're moving from a mainframe to the PC
> > area.
> > Much thanks in advance!!!!