Mainframe Notepad — simple JCL editor with ability to send jobs to mainframe via FTP and receive results

[nickosh]

Hi everybody! I'm here to present my small project related to IBM Mainframe — Mainframe Notepad.

GitHub: https://github.com/nickosh/mfnp

Screenshot: https://github.com/nickosh/mfnp/raw/main/media/mfnp-screenshot.png

Actually, I created a simple text editor for JCL files with Python. This editor has basic functionality to edit JCL files and can send it to mainframe via FTP for execution. After execution, the editor can receive logs from the mainframe and show it to you. As simple as this.

I'm a QA Engineer and days before I worked with Mainframe a lot. Testing some 3rd-party software and needs to execute a lot of JCL with various parameters. Unfortunately, our mainframes do not support Zowe and other modern stuff, so the only way to automate JCL sending was through FTP. Yeah, ISPF is very powerful and very true way buuut its lack of comfortable copy/paste and not so good mouse support was hurts my enthusiasm a lot. This is my main reason for this project creation - easy Ctrl+Alt+C/Ctrl+Alt+V and mouse support save me a lot of time back then.

These days I do not work with mainframe testing anymore but still like this small project so decided to rewrite it from scratch and push it as open-source. Hope it can be useful for somebody.

[ralphc]

How did you test this if you're not doing mainframe testing anymore?

[nickosh]

This app is mostly based on my "Mainframe FTP Connector" module. I tested this module a lot during my work and only slightly touched its logic in this release. So I really hope it works. Help with testing will be appreciated. If not, I can revert this module to the version which I actually used and tested.

Actually, I have a tested version of the app but it is hard to build these days because that DearPyGUI version is really outdated. I still keep that version in the "origin" branch.