Natural Eclipse & Natural Studio

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1

Hello,

As it is possible to have both, Natural Eclipse and Natural Studio, and if I need to choose one of them, which would be more productive, which one would have more tools to the development?

Would I get to execute my applications using Natural Eclipse? Do I need to have Natural Studio installed to do it? Or if I am connected to the target environment (using SPoD - NDV), would the execution be automatically? How it would be possible to integrate the execution with other program languages or DB access like on SPoD?
Do I have all facilities and resources on Natural Eclipse than Natural Studio? (Except MF navigator and DB schema generation, I suppose it).

As my company and the programmers know Natural, which would be the best choice?

Thanks.

2

As I understand it …

If you don’t have Windows clients, the answer is simple: Natural for Eclipse is your only GUI option.

If you have Windows clients, consider the following.

Natural Studio

  • Is really Natural.
  • Is bundled with a run-time environment. You have a choice of running via SPoD or locally.
  • Doesn’t have all the developer-friendly features of Eclipse, but SAG is incorporating more of these with each release of Natural for Windows.

Natural for Eclipse

  • Lets you standardize on a single development environment for Natural, Java, etc.
  • Takes advantage of many developer-friendly Eclipse features.
  • Is an editor, not a compiler.
  • Requires CVS (or equivalent) to maintain local source libraries. Natural does not control this.
  • Requires SPoD for execution. There is no local run-time environment.
3

Hi Ralph,

Let me see if I understood.

I can use NFE only as editor program. If I want some resources and features such as: to execute, to call Cobol, Assembler, to protect the application using LOCK facility, and others, do I need to use Natural Studio instead of NFE?

I think that these resources are NDV features and not Natural Studio.

Will these features and resources be available on NFE?

Thanks.

4

Natural for Eclipse is used to create/maintain the source code. I believe that Eclipse locks the code during editing to avoid concurrent updates by multiple developers.

CSV protects the source code at the application/library level.

NDV is used to move the source to the mainframe/Unix server for compilation and execution.

If you have Studio, then Eclipse is redundant. If you don’t have Windows clients, then Studio isn’t available, so you need Eclipse. If you have NDV plus Windows clients, then you can choose between Studio and Eclipse.

5

Hi Ralph,

Thanks. As my company has both client stations and NDV, it’s up to each user to choose which editor program they want to use. I assume that the eclipse users’ needs to know that there are some features that they cannot use. It would be: To execute object calling other languages and to integrate with add-on products.

For me, I will still keep using Natural Studio.

Thanks