Hi all,

I work for a large corporation and I've become involved in a project that has been tasked with evaluating the feasibility, or otherwise, of the Unix platform for running some of our production system. Our background is predominantly mainframe and I need some help identifying 'best of breed' applications in the Unix environment. Some of the people who will end up developing on the Unix will be mainframe people who will be retrained. From our extensive mainframe experience we think we have a decent idea of which types of tools will be required on a day-to-day basis, but I expect there will be some gaps in our knowledge and I'm hoping that some of you can help me out.

For a number of years, we'll run the Unix and z/OS mainframe in parallel and data will have to be transferred back and forth between the two. The batch system will be written in COBOL. There's a front-end written in Java, running on websphere servers, that will need to access data on the Unix platform.

Here's what I know for sure:
- the hardware will be Sun Solaris
- we'll be using Korn shell
- the database on the Unix platform will be Oracle
- the COBOL IDE will very probably be Micro Focus Net Express, running on the developers WinXP workstations
- we'll run Samba

Here's what we think we need:
- a tool for writing and testing scripts
- a SORT utility that can be executed from a script
- a script scheduler that supports predicate/dependancy requirements (restart features would be nice too)
- source control tool
- ISAM editor that supports the use of record layouts
- tool for comparing files
- tool for accessing the Oracle database
- a tool for transferring/converting files between Unix and the mainframe (we're looking at Fileport for this, but would like another candidate or two)
- report generation tool, perhaps two, a very powerful one for the developers, and a simpler, more user-friendly one for the end-users

We would be ok with open source solutions, although licensing costs won't be an issue either. Our focus is on getting the best possible tools that will be robust and powerful enough to support an enterprise-level system.

Hopefully I've provided enough information for someone to give me some advice, but if I need to clarify anything, please let me know.

thanks for taking the time to read this, any advice you can offer will be much appreciated.