Written by Billie Jean Simmons, Squad lead for Zowe Explorer and Software developer for IBM.
This article originally ran on Zowe’s Medium Blog. For more content like this, click here.
Photo by Pakata Goh on Unsplash
As Open Mainframe Project’s Zowe Explorer surpasses 100k downloads from the VS Code Marketplace we are excitedly preparing our first v3 pre-release of the Zowe Explorer suite of products.
- Zowe Explorer
- Zowe Explorer Extension for FTP
-
Zowe Explorer APIs
Out with the Old
Changes that will affect all users
We would like to announce the removal of support for the v1 style yaml profiles, previously deprecated. The Team Configuration file, introduced in v2, will be the only supported profile management at this time. If a user installs the v3 pre-release and has v1 yaml profiles in place they will experience an error message like this.
The menu when creating profiles has changed as well with the only option of creating a new Team Configuration profile file at the global or project level.
Find out more about the Team Configuration file in the Zowe documentation.
We have also moved the persistent settings for the trees to VS Code’s local storage. This will affect users that update the history settings manually to favorites, history, searchHistory, and fileHistory of the Data Sets, Unix System Service, and Jobs trees. The original lists in the persistent storage of the tree’s history will be migrated over, but manual updates after that migration will not be recognized.
Changes that affect extenders
APIs being removed include:
- IUss.putContents
- IJes.getJobsByOwnerAndPrefix
- ICommand.issueTsoCommand
- ZoweVsCodeExtension.showVsCodeMessage
- ZoweVsCodeExtension.inputBox
- ZoweVsCodeExtension.promptCredentials
We have put together a list of all deprecated APIs that we are removing and dropping support for with their supported replacements. We want to release breaking changes as soon as possible for our extenders to plan and prepare for early adoption of v3.
In with the New
We would like our users, extenders, and contributors to jump in the driver’s seat, or at least a little backseat driving and join in on the discussions.
- What capabilities would you like us to add?
- What processes could be better when using Zowe Explorer?
- What would make extending Zowe Explorer easier?
Join in on the discussion we have for possible v3 enhancements such as UNIX Command support or adopting VS Codes’ new read-only setting for certain files like spool files, or start your own discussion in our Github repository. Let us know how you feel about the removal of v1 profiles. We want to hear it all and see all of the great ideas come together into something really exciting for the community.
Learn More
If you enjoyed this blog, check out more Zowe blogs here. Or, ask a question and join the conversation on the Open Mainframe Project Slack Channel #zowe-explorer, #zowe-cli, as well as #zowe-dev, #zowe-user, #zowe-api, or #zowe-onboarding.
If this is your first time using the Open Mainframe Slack Channel register here.
