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What’s New in Zowe 3.2

By | May 29, 2025

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 3.2 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 3.2 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. Watch this video or read the blog below.

🌐 Community Pulse

Five years in, Zowe continues to grow steadily, with a yearly adoption increase of around 10%, especially in client-side tools.

There are only 8 people who contribute 50 per cent of the code to Zowe. First, kudos to these contributors, they are doing a great job. Second, we look for further contributors to ensure these people contribute a lower percentage of the code.

🧪 Highlights from Zowe 3.2

Watch the recording of the System Demo, this part starts at the 43-minute mark

Zowe CLI

  • New option to overwrite existing datasets, including all members
  • Use regular expressions to search across multiple datasets or members
  • Environment variables can now override config profiles

Explorer for VS Code

  • Regex search with case sensitivity options
  • Pagination support for large datasets and spool files
  • Cross-LPAR dataset copying
  • Support for client certificates when connecting to z/OSMF
  • Streamlined team configuration and profile schema updates
  • Switch between available locales
  • Possibility to create a new profile from Search by Directory in the USS section

API Mediation Layer

  • Now certified to run on Java 21

Installation and Configuration

  • Logs enriched with z/OS version, ESM type, and Java version
  • New Certificate Analyser flags expired or invalid certs (e.g. missing EKU

📣 Community Engagement

At SHARE 2025 in New York, we hosted six Zowe-focused sessions, each drawing around 25 participants, with high engagement throughout. There are two new articles on Zowe Medium blog — one on setting up Zowe’s z/OS server with corporate certificates, another focused on HLASM development.

Additionally, our quarterly webinar series continues, most recently diving into simplifying the API Mediation Layer setup.

Still, we aim higher. We’re actively working to get more feedback from real-world users and to showcase better how Zowe is being used in the wild.

🔍 Looking Ahead

The community has set clear priorities for the coming months. To watch the recording of the System Demo, this part starts at the 2-hour and 10-minute mark.

📘 Documentation

  • Enhanced Single Sign-On (SSO) and AT-TLS configuration guides
  • Clearer steps for client certificate authentication
  • Leverage AI to streamline navigation and contributor experience

⚙️ CLI & Explorer for VS Code

  • Table views for datasets and job lists
  • One-click download of dataset members, drag-and-drop file uploads
  • Read-only browsing to avoid accidental changes
  • Better handling of CICS resources and extension palette cleanup

🔒 Authentication & Security

  • Pre-flight checks and AT-TLS validations
  • Default to bring-your-own keyring
  • Simplified API Mediation Layer architecture and hardened security

🧩 Ecosystem & Tooling

  • Explore JCL-based automation for Zowe configuration
  • Improve IntelliJ integration with the API Mediation Layer
  • More robust installation automation and infrastructure tooling

🧭 Final Thoughts

Zowe 3.2 is part of a long-term transformation towards better usability, stronger integrations, and a broader, more inclusive contributor base.

Whether you’re an enterprise developer, a system programmer, or just Zowe-curious, now is a good time to dive in.

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.

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