How Zowe Is Opening Minds to the Mainframe
Seven years in, the open-source tool set has proved to be a ‘game changer’ in attracting younger developers to a foundational platform
By Andrew Wig
How Zowe Is Opening Minds to the Mainframe
Seven years in, the open-source tool set has proved to be a ‘game changer’ in attracting early-career developers to a foundational platform
By Andrew Wig
If you’re looking for a sign that the mainframe has changed with the times, look no further than Zowe, the open-source project that helped open up the platform to a new generation of developers.
When the Open Mainframe Project introduced the collection of modern tools and interfaces in 2018 as the first z/OS-based open-source project, a main driver of the effort was the fact that organizations were running out of people with the skills to work on the mainframe.
“Not being able to get the people to work on it for various reasons, that was a major block,” Jakub Balhar, chair of the Zowe Technical Steering Committee, said in an interview with TechChannel.
The mainframe wasn’t being taught in many colleges or universities, and its reputation had conjured visions of the old-fashioned green screen, anathema to a crop of technologists that grew up pointing and clicking. Yet, z/OS persisted, and IBM declared the z16, launched in 2022, its most successful mainframe program ever.
That success story coincided with the rise of Zowe, a part of the Open Mainframe Project's efforts to standardize the mainframe development experience, with collaborators including IBM, BMC, Rocket Software and Balhar's employer, Broadcom Mainframe Software. Among Zowe’s assortment of tools, the most helpful to early-career developers, “without any doubt,” are Explorer for Visual Studio Code (VS Code) and Explorer for IntelliJ, according to Balhar.
1 Million … and Counting
The numbers behind Zowe’s growing popularity:
Nearing 200,000 Active Users
Over 1 million downloads
85% planning to adopt Zowe or already have
Seven years after its initial release, Zowe is now nearing 200,000 active users and has surpassed 1 million downloads, Balhar noted. Additionally, Explorer for IntelliJ, introduced as part of Zowe V3 in the fall of 2024, has surpassed 10,000 downloads—in Balhar’s view, a significant number to reach in such a short time, given the relatively small user base of the IntelliJ platform.
The Open Mainframe Project’s 2024 Annual Report cited a survey finding that 85% of responding organizations were planning to adopt Zowe by the end that year or already had adopted the tool set. And with the release of Zowe V3 in the fall of 2024, Zowe has become “the quintessential example of open source collaboration” on the mainframe, the annual report stated.
Those users are taking advantage of a set of interfaces that have modernized the mainframe experience and expanded its accessibility to newer developers.
“It's really a game changer for them, because they're used to pointing and clicking. They're not used to line-by-line code so much, as I would've been when I was a COBOL developer,” Pat Stanard, a Distinguished Engineer and U.S. mainframe architect at Kyndryl, said in an interview with TechChannel.
Zowe’s modern interfaces, especially Explorer, make it easy for developers to forget they’re working on a mainframe, unbothered by the TSO/ISPF commands running behind the scenes, Stanard noted.
The Zowe Family
The Explorer extensions are just two components of the extensive Zowe suite. Here are some other prominent components of Zowe:
API Mediation Layer
Provides a single point of access for APIs and offers single sign-on (SSO) capabilities for mainframe users. Facilitates secure communication through API types including REST, GraphQL and Web-Socket.
CLI
Allows users to interact with the mainframe in a familiar, off-platform format in the following ways: Interacting with mainframe files, submitting jobs, issuing TSO and z/OS console commands, integrating z/Os actions into scripts, producing responses as JSON documents.
API Mediation Layer
Zowe Application Framework
A web-based user interface that includes Zowe Desktop, an extensible browser-based UI containing applications like a TN3270 emulator, VT Terminal for SSH, JES Explorer for job and spool output and file editor for USS and MVS data sets.
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A Universal Development Environment
While most recent computer science graduates won’t have deep familiarity with z/OS, they all have experience with VS Code, said Stanard, who works heavily in mainframe education at Kyndryl and teaches mainframe skills at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston. “Universities use VS Code primarily as a platform to put all the languages on top of to run,” he explained.
In fact, VS Code has become such a standard that the IBM Z Xplore learning platform, which Stanard uses in his instruction, employs VS Code as its primary interface. TSO/ISPF used to fill that role, “and I'll tell you, the students had a hard time using this interface,” Stanard said. “You have to know the commands. You have to make sure the cursor’s in the right spot. You have to understand the different panels and that type of thing.”
Other Tools Helping New Mainframers
Zowe and VS Code aren’t the only tools opening up the mainframe to early-career developers. Stanard and Balhar pointed to several other innovations that have helped modernize z/OS:
watsonX Code Assistant for Z:
A generative AI tool (GenAI) that can analyze, refactor, explain, generate, optimize and transform code into modern languages like Java.
z/OSMF:
⟶
A point-and-click control, system management interface automating daily operations and admin tasks in z/OS. (z/OSMF APIs serve as the backend for many functions within Zowe CLI and Zowe Explorer.)
UNIX System Services (USS):
⟶
Enables the mainframe to run UNIX-like commands, shell scripts and applications.
Native Git support, GitHub integration:
⟶
Facilitates modern development workflows by providing Git-based version control directly on the mainframe.
Python:
⟶
The most popular programming language of today, increasingly being used on the mainframe, thanks to tools such as IBM Open Enterprise SDK for Python and the IBM Python AI Toolkit for z/OS.
z/OS Open Automation Utilities (ZOAU):
⟶
A runtime environment that enables interaction with Multiple Virtual Storage (MVS) facilities and automation of mainframe tasks using UNIX shell commands or modern scripting languages like Python.
Ansible:
⟶
A modern automation and orchestration framework that integrates provisioning, deployment, configuration and management tasks.
A Mainframe ‘Metamorphosis’
“It’s not just Zowe now,” Balhar said of the open-source tools that are modernizing the mainframe development experience. He added, however, “Zowe Explorer is more or less the basis for everything that's out there.”
This proliferation of modernization tools amounts to a "metamorphosis" in how technologists interact with the mainframe, said Stanard, who is in a good position to witness that evolution.
