For several decades, the development of enterprise applications on mainstream systems was mainly designed in coding languages such as COBOL or Assembler. Nowadays, several of those previously developed applications are still being used in the z/OS system landscapes of many companies. Due to the declining range of workforce, the maintainance and the development of such applications have become increasingly difficult. Furthermore, coding languages such as C++ or Java are increasingly in the focus, even in the mainframe infrastructure.

One important aspect of an efficient application development is the selection of a suitable development environment. Especially in large scale enterprises and in the context of Java and Mainframe-Computing, the selection of a suitable development environment is a complex task.

In the scope of this untertaking, an evaluation framework for the selection of a development environment in the context of Java and Mainframe-Computing is meant to be developed. Therefore, appropriate requirements have to be determined and structured and classified afterwards.