Wonderful Editing

Use your favorite operating system to start developing NATURAL code, without having to change your existing runtime environment (mainframe or open systems).

Useful additions like error markers show and remember your syntax errors, you can mark code for tasks you need to complete later, syntax highlighting Is provided, and so on.

Built-in Cross Referencing

Immediately view what dependencies your code has from the Dependency View that updates with the editor.

Outline for Code

Long pieces of code to maintain? No worries! natclipse shows a constantly-updated outline of the code you're currently editing. Have quick access to variable definitions, subroutines, includes, and so on.

Point-and-click Map Editing

Use the convenient point-and-click interface to manipulate your NATURAL maps. That's how it was always supposed to be!

Quick Overview

With the Call Sequence View, thousands of lines of code get condensed to just the important steps. This is especially useful for people maintaining old code or code they haven't written themselves. Save time, money, and let the computer do the crunching for you.

No Software!

Plug natclipse straight into your existing NATURAL host system - be that mainframe, Windows, Linux or Unix - and get started! Nothing else required, no EntireX, no NATURAL Development Server. Just use what you've already got.

Unify How You Manage Code Across Technologies

natclipse integrates with most versioning systems available today. By downloading the source code from the host for control within Eclipse, developers can use all the tools available to the desktop. CVS, Subversion, Team Foundation Server or ClearCase are among the many code management systems that can be accessed from natclipse. Yet the unique capabilities of TSI's industry-leading N2O mainframe product remain available and integrated.

If you already have web development teams, you can employ their same methodology in NATURAL. Concurrent code editing, team code reviews, software releases, unlimited code history, code comparisons across versions, branching, merging, tagging, and so on. The list of modern software engineering principles available in this new world is virtually endless.

Analyze This

If you think your NATURAL application is one big monolithic block of code, think again. You can actually look into the application with bulk analysis tools and find metrics for most of your questions:

Is the code ready for modernization?

What is the quality of my code? Am I making it better or worse?

What do I have to do to migrate from a mainframe to open systems?

natclipse contains natanalyzer that lets you look into the NATURAL code and find out what you have to do. Analysis results are presented in a graphical view as well as an Excel-like detail view and you can export them into a CSV file.

Visual Data Browsing. No hassle.

NATURAL developers often face data-heavy applications. They need to inspect the data their programs run on to make informed decisions about how their code performs. NATURAL/ADABAS does not have a data browsing facility like other databases such as Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server. Developers revert to writing small programs to read and display data.

In a modern development environment like natclipse, it would simply be antiquated to have to write such queries manually over and over again. adaclipse, part of natclipse, creates queries on data, remembers the queries and visualizes the results in an Eclipse view.
Developers can focus on their tasks instead of having to write throwaway code over and over again.

Integration with Team Systems

natclipse's tight integration with practically any versioning/SCM system allows integration of NATURAL code and developers into ongoing other development efforts, like web projects in .NET, enterprise application in Java, and even C/C++ programming.

natclipse embraces this and extends the concepts by automatically considering and resolving all dependencies created by a change. This means in particular that synchronization processes (that often introduce code from other team members into the workspace) are possible and handled by natclipse.

An easy view into the history of an object is possible, and files from the past can be accessed and compared.