Micro Focus unveils developer tools

Updates Revolve application governance suite

Development software specialist Micro Focus unveiled a series of new toolsets last week designed to improve firms' application governance and help them modernise development of their legacy Cobol-based systems.

Product director Jim Baum said the company had updated its Revolve application governance suite to improve its ease of use and provide enhanced auditing capabilities to help firms prove their applications are in compliance with regulations such as Sarbanes Oxley.

He added that Revolve Enterprise Edition 7.0's ability to analyse various application components and their interrelationships would help IT developers mitigate risk and decrease deployment times as they undertake maintenance or migrate towards service-oriented architectures (SOAs) that rely on reusable application components.

Separately, Micro Focus also launched three new Cobol development products – Net Express 5.0, Micro Focus Server for Cobol and Micro Focus Server for .Net - featuring integration with dot-net and Microsoft's Visual Studio development environment.

Andy Sinclair, senior director of product management at the company, said the new integration would allow developers to do all their development and testing work for Cobol in the same Visual Studio IDE they use for dot-net. "This brings Cobol into the dot-net framework as a first-class citizen," he added. "It means firms can reduce their support costs as people only have to work off the one IDE."