IBM announces IBM Z JCL Expert 1.2

December 7, 2023

This new release can help accelerate testing and production delivery of Job Control Language streams, with an additional interface for integration in a DevOps pipeline and the integration with IBM Z Workload Scheduler to help avoid false alerts.

Some of the key features and benefits of the new release are the following:

Security checking for submitter users.
Integration with IBM Z Workload Scheduler to automatically resolve variables leveraged by the scheduler product to help avoid false errors during the JCL validation process.
- This integration includes launching JCL Expert from the IZWS Dynamic Workload Console (DWS).
Provides new extensibility & new interfaces to service IBM clients:
- Eclipse plug-in. Users can invoke IBM Z JCL Expert from IBM Developer for z/OS by the IBM Z JCL Expert Eclipse plug-in.
- RESTful APIs. The REST APIs enable the tool to be invoked for a single member or all members of a PDS or PDSE, and as a block of JCL text.
  - The Zowe API Mediation Layer and IBM z/OS Management Facility (z/OSMF) are required to run the IBM Z JCL Expert APIs.
  - Zowe CLI plugin. The IBM Z JCL Expert plugin for Zowe CLI adds the group of commands named “zjcl-expert” or “jclx.”
Validation across multiple systems. This capability enables customers to validate JCL associated with a plan, especially in a large production batch environments, managed by IZWS to validate.
Improved Site-specific JCL standards – Provides compliance with site-specific JCL coding standards is enforced by defining site rules for the tool to validate.
Validation of the existence of IBM® Db2® plans and subsystems that is referenced in the JCL.
Enhanced syntax checking with the addition of Job Entry Control Language (JECL), data definition (DD), and JES execution control statement
Surrogate security checking – When a job is submitted in production, this feature will allow the job to run under a different user id.