Written by Jakub Balhar, Engineer at Broadcom, Zowe TSC Chair and Open Mainframe Project Ambassador
This article originally ran on Jakub’s Medium blog. For more content like this, click here.
As we continue our journey to modernise and open up the mainframe ecosystem, Open Mainframe Project’s Zowe 3.3 introduces a wave of improvements, refinements, and foundational updates that aim to make enterprise development and operations smoother, more transparent, and easier to contribute to.
Zowe 3.3 is available to download via zowe.org/download, through the relevant marketplaces for Explorer for VS Code and Explorer for Intellij
Let’s take a look at what’s new — and what’s coming next.
🌐 Community Pulse
The most popular piece of code from Zowe is the replacement for keytar from CLI squad, with more than 500k Downloads quarterly this solution solves real problem also outside the z/OS world.
There is an improvement in the contributor dependency, as of now, there are 10 people instead of 8 responsible for 50% of code.
🧪 Highlights from Zowe 3.3
Watch the recording of the System Demo, this part starts at the 43-minute mark
API Mediation Layer
- Single Service Deployment (Technical Preview)— An option to run all the services as one instead of separate services.
Zowe CLI
- Authentication — Added property authOrder which allows user to specify the priority of different credentials.
- New timeout options — To limit timeout on initial SSH handshake and to limit the overall time for the request.
Explorer for VS Code
- Polling Active Jobs — Configure Zowe Explorer to ask repeatedly for status of specific jobs. The time between requests is configurable.
- Data Sets Table View — Table showing details, allowing filtering and sorting
- Upload with Encoding — On upload in VS Code you can select what encoding to apply
zOS Squad
- Instalation and configuration improvements — ZIS Startup validation, zwe init using JCL, zwe init with dry-run mode
📣 Community Engagement
Join us for the sessions on IBM TechXChange and GS UK. The Zowe and Open Mainframe Project will be involved and sharing the news, tips and tricks.
SHARE 2025 Cleveland
There was a track of OMP related work that reflected the Zowe community as well.
🔍 Looking Ahead
📘 Documentation
- Improve certificate related documentation for the API Mediation Layer on how to use the certificates to authenticate.
⚙️ CLI & Explorer for VS Code
- GA for the SSH based backend (Zowe Remote SSH)
- Request throttling on the CLI to limit overload on the z/OS systems
- Retry request functionality for the Explorer for VS Code
- Specify the place to download the member/USS file to
⚙️ Kotlin SDK & Explorer for Intellij
- Kotlin SDK running TSO command through SSH
- Integration with the API ML for authentication in the Extension
🔒 Authentication & Security
- OIDC Support Improvements — Multiple OIDC providers, Accepting the claim other than sub for the identity
- Hardware ICSF Keyring Support — Afterwards recommending the usage of SAF as the authentication provider for API ML.
🧩 Ecosystem & Tooling
- Improve test coverage and scenarios within the Marist Infrastructure
- Finalize removing of Node.js from the installation process
- Improve the validation of the ports related rules
🧭 Final Thoughts
Zowe 3.3 improved on the works of the previous versions and introduces important simplifications as technical preview that will be
If you enjoyed this blog checkout more Zowe blogs here. Or, ask a question and join the conversation on the Open Mainframe Project Slack Channel #Zowe-help or #Zowe-onboarding. If this is your first time using the OMP slack channel register here.
