Easy Toolkit

The Easy Toolkit (ETK) is a collection of tools developed by Advanced Logics in the 1990's to help create COBOL code that is portable between different operating systems and compiler toolchains. It should accelerate COBOL software development with some RAD like tools. In addition to OS/2 the package supports DOS, 16 and 32 bit variants of MS Windows, most UNIX-like systems, IBM AS/400, 370/MVS TSO and CICS, BULL GCOS8 TSS & TP8, DEC VAX/VMS, Data General, HP and UNISYS.

Features
As ETK was intended to be scalable from simple single user stand-alone programs to major multi user applications involving millions of lines of code, it provided a number of tools to help with the creation of portable code including:
 * A Finite State Machine and an associated specialised text editor. The idea is that you describe the high-level logic of the program as an FMS and the ETK converted that to COBOL code. The FMS is not a necessary ingredient of the toolkit, programs could be written using only COBOL, but it could cut down development time considerably.
 * Screen Painter for interactive programs called SCRNIO. Allows you to describe the screen layout of program, unusually the painter could paint screens for text based, Windows GUI, and Web browser HTML-based modes, all at the same time.
 * A collection of Database Tools. These allow you to describe the files and databases to be used, ETK supports sequential/relative/indexed files (traditional COBOL database structures in other words), SQL, and hierarchical databases.
 * A portable COBOL Editor and an associated specification for a portable COBOL subset. You are meant to write the application logic in a portable subset of COBOL, it is nota bene not necessary to use the provided editor, you can continue to use your preferred programming editor, but it is vital to stick to the specification to ensure code portability.

License

 * Commercial software - Discontinued.