Mainframe COBOL » cobol

Micro Focus releases PL/I migration kit

Mike — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 02:01:39 +0000

Dating back to the 1960s, the idea behind PL/I was that it would provide a common programming language for business and scientific applications, allowing it to replace COBOL and FORTRAN. The language is largely, though not exclusively, associated with IBM mainframes.

While COBOL was commonly used to write commercial programs, some companies did adopt PL/I. The language is still offered by IBM, with support for z/OS®, VM, VSE/ESA, AIX, and Windows.

Micro Focus – perhaps best known for its COBOL compilers – has now released Micro Focus Server Enterprise Edition for PL/I to migrate IBM mainframe PL/I applications to Windows Server, Linux or Unix with minimal changes. The company claims a potential reduction in operating costs of up to 70%, without the risks involved in rewriting or replacing applications.

Starsoft Develops Cross-Platform Applications with Veryant isCOBOL

Trevor Eddolls — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 11:03:02 +0000

Innovative application development methodology produces portable Web applications

CHICAGO, November 21, 2011 – Veryant, the COBOL technology innovator, today introduced a new customer, Starsoft, which chose isCOBOL Evolve to create a new cross-platform methodology for its traditional COBOL customers and enter the Unix/Linux open systems market, all while protecting its valuable legacy applications.

Starsoft, which offers professional IT services to insurance and finance companies, was looking for the next level of growth through new markets. The company sought to move beyond its traditional expertise with the IBM iSeries platform to provide services to a growing number of companies with open systems environments.

The company selected Veryant’s isCOBOL technology to combine COBOL and Java for Web-based application development. This would help the company continue providing services for COBOL customers, but gain strength with companies using other platforms.

While the primary goal of the initiative was to offer vertical insurance applications on multiple platforms, there were additional benefits. These included reducing the resources required to develop applications, enabling all development work to be performed in a standard Web browser, and providing a viable option for legacy modernization.

Starsoft evaluated various technology options in the market. It selected Veryant’s isCOBOL Evolve because it met multiple criteria, including 100% platform portability, convenient data access, flexibility, and support for standard Web interfaces.

isCOBOL Evolve is a complete environment for developing and deploying applications across Linux, UNIX, Microsoft Windows and Mac systems. Because the isCOBOL Runtime Environment is implemented in Java, it produces extremely portable code that simplifies integration and interoperability. isCOBOL also supports COBOL exit routines. This enabled Starsoft to maintain data integrity and modernize existing applications without changing application code.

“isCOBOL provides the best of both worlds. It protects long-standing COBOL application business logic and enables cross-platform deployment as pure Java objects through standard Web interfaces,” explained Dov Keshet, CEO and founder of Starsoft.

“Developing with isCOBOL has allowed us to take a step forward in a strategic area that is critical for our growth. Before, most customers’ core systems were based on the IBM’s iSeries, which limited our options for company growth,” Keshet explained. “In fact, our first project with isCOBOL is for a new customer using a Unix/Oracle platform.”

During the project, Starsoft first built a set of internal utilities to support the application development methodology that had evolved from years of experience working with many different companies. The effort then shifted towards integration … setting up the development and runtime environments, the operating systems (both Linux and Windows), database (MySQL, Oracle and DB2), IDE (Eclipse), Java integration (JSP/Servlet model, Web Services), and the client-side user interface (CSS and JavaScript, including JQuery, and browser support).

“We had no critical issues regarding development, and never encountered anything that didn’t work – or didn’t even install – as we had with other products we evaluated before selecting Veryant’s isCOBOL,” Keshet continued. “Questions for the Veryant team were answered promptly, often within minutes. This was critical for us, as we had never ventured beyond the IBM iSeries.”

About Veryant

Veryant delivers COBOL development, maintenance and modernization technology that optimizes IT resources, improves business performance, and dramatically lowers cost. Whether you are evolving existing applications through SOA, migrating from mainframes to open systems, or improving quality and distribution processes, Veryant’s innovative software increases business productivity. Veryant is headquartered in Chicago, with offices worldwide. Visit www.veryant.com.

COBOL, The Computer Language that Refused to Die

Mike — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 23:34:12 +0000

There is a tendency to think that with technology everything old is swept aside by the new. But behind every shiny toy is one of the most powerful axioms of engineering: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Once established, computer languages tend to fit that model. It is not simply that they have been used to create applications which continue to work, the software engineers’ coding skills do not disappear instantly either. Although there cannot be many around who were in at the genesis of Cobol in 1959.

Veryant’s COBOL Technology Improves Thin Client Performance and Portability

Mike — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 18:28:12 +0000

New isCOBOL Evolve provides cost-effective, modern path for COBOL application investments

CHICAGO – August 15, 2011 – Veryant, the COBOL and Java technology innovator, today announced up to a 40% thin client performance improvement, new cross-platform portability, and modernized user interface capabilities for its popular isCOBOL Evolve.

The new software release maximizes the value of existing COBOL assets, reduces ongoing software licensing costs, and simplifies application modernization.

Visit www.veryant.com for more info.

Applying lean practices to application development

Mike — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 18:00:07 +0000

I may have to interact with middleware, enterprise apps that may be in SAP or Seybold, and I may even have to go off to some legacy app that’s in COBOL.

He CICS, he scores!

Trevor Eddolls — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 19:42:09 +0000

Sadly, as a title, it only works if you’re in the parts of the world where CICS is pronounced ‘kicks’ and where people play football (and getting the ball in the back of the net is very important!). But wherever you are, I want to talk about IBM’s transaction processing system whose full title is Customer Information Control System and which runs under z/OS and z/VSE.

Basically, CICS allows users to sit at their screen and run transactions against data. It’s reckoned that about 90% of the Fortune 500 companies use CICS for banking, insurance, and various industrial systems. CICS is incredibly resilient with users potentially logging in through browsers, and the application programs they use being written in a wide variety of programming languages. The most recent version is CICS TS 4.2.

CICS first appeared in July 1969 – the year a man first walked on the moon and films such as Midnight Cowboy, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and True Grit were nominated for Oscars. The DFH prefix for CICS messages has been apocryphally attributed to stand for the Denver Foot Hills. Development of CICS has been at the Hursley UK site since 1974.

CICS programs were pseudo-conversational – which means that they appeared as if they were conversational, while actually not being. This design meant that valuable resources were not locked waiting for a user to respond to a message. In fact coding to maximize what could be done while using the minimum amount of resources was a trick that COBOL programmers were forced to learn. Programs were multi-threaded, which meant one copy of the code could be used by more than one transaction.

System calls to CICS (eg reading a record) originally required the use of a macro call – hence the name macro-level CICS. During the 1980s we got command-level CICS. Command-level-only CICS came in the 1990s and support for macro-level application programs went.

In terms of programming languages, early users had COBOL and PL/I, and, of course, Assembler. More recently, we’ve seen Enterprise Java Beans (EJB). CICS transactions can now be invoked using an HTTP request, so CICS transactions can act as servers in a POX or REST conversation. JCICS classes allow CICS services to be called using Java. CICS programs can be Web service providers or requesters.

The new CICS Explorer Eclipse-based graphical tooling interface for CICS provides a modern-looking management interface to CICS.

If you are interested in finding out more about CICS, you’ll be interested in the Virtual CICS user group at www.fundi.com/virtualcics. You’ll also be very interested to know that there’s a user group meeting on Tuesday 12 July at 10:30 CDT. The meeting uses Citrix GoToMeeting so you don’t need to leave your desk, and will include a presentation by Jeff Geminder, who’s a Principal Consultant with CA. The title of the presentation is: Cross-enterprise application performance monitoring and CICS-specific drill-down: approaches to finding the performance problem needle in the heterogeneous haystack. Jeff says; “In today’s complex multi-platform world, how can businesses stay ahead of the curve by reducing outages and minimizing downtime? Specifically, how can we tell whether CICS is or is not the culprit. In effect how can we find that needle in the heterogeneous haystack and get the right people in the right place at the right time.”

To find out more and to get details about how to register for the webinar, go to www.fundi.com/virtualcics/meetings.htm.

The case for COBOL

Mike — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 01:09:50 +0000

It is still innovative, agile and everywhere

Often the next version of the technology has arrived even before an organisation has had a chance to get a grip with the current version. So how can one technology survive over 50 years, and continue to dominate the Industry among such change and growth?

Even Java, a much lauded language when it arrived 20 years ago, is already deemed to be old and “legacy”. Yet, according to analyst Gartner, more than 70% of the world’s business is run by a technology that was christened over 50 years ago – COBOL, or Common Business-Oriented Language.

Over the many years COBOL has continuously evolved to keep pace with technology developments, integrating seamlessly with most modern technologies today. Most importantly, it has retained many of its traditional strengths.

Migrating legacy applications: if it ain’t broke, don’t move it

Mike — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 21:41:32 +0000

Scaling of users and transactions has multiplied a hundred fold in the time since 20-year-old business IT applications written in older (often mainframe-centric) languages such as COBOL were written. READ MORE

Veryant Releases New Options for COBOL Modernization

Trevor Eddolls — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 09:54:45 +0000

New version of isCOBOL enhances GUI development and maximizes value of existing IT resources

CHICAGO, April 11, 2011 – Veryant, the COBOL and Java technology innovator, today announced the immediate availability of isCOBOL Evolve 2011 Release 1. To lower software licensing fees and simplify application modernization, isCOBOL Evolve enables developers to continue programming in a familiar COBOL environment, and at the same time, deploy and enhance applications across multiple platforms in an open Java framework without rewriting code.

The new version of isCOBOL offers rapid COBOL application development and graphical user interface (GUI) modernization.

Organizations updating legacy COBOL applications with modern Web 2.0 user interfaces can build dynamic GUIs directly in the COBOL language with the graphical isCOBOL Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Developers can quickly add functionality such as customizable docking windows to GUIs and automatically propose values from a preset list or a user’s history to end users completing form entry fields. In addition to COBOL, the isCOBOL IDE now supports Java, XML, and HTML editing capabilities, as well as a Hex editor and version control with CVS and Subversion, providing a streamlined, industry-standard environment for building, deploying, and testing applications across the entire software lifecycle, regardless of language.

The newest isCOBOL release also helps businesses make more efficient use of existing IT infrastructure by conserving processing resources through a new load balancer and remote compilation feature.

The isCOBOL Load Balancer is for organizations distributing COBOL applications with 100% portable thin client user interfaces. An add-on product to isCOBOL Application Server, it distributes workloads among clusters of server processes running on the same or different machines for enhanced horizontal scalability or workload separation.

The addition of a remote compilation feature to the isCOBOL IDE allows developers to incorporate server-side pre-compilers and translators into the application build step. Developers can now push files to a server, preprocess, compile, and then pull errors and .class files back into the isCOBOL IDE with a single click of the mouse.

Other enhancements include:

· improved database performance, up to 33%, by reducing overhead on read workloads with ESQL FETCH statements

· effortless editing of applications with ANSI fixed-format code with the addition of a horizontal ruler and COBOL source area vertical guidelines in the isCOBOL IDE

· support for Eclipse Helios, the latest in the Eclipse release train

About Veryant

The Coming Code Crisis

Mike — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 22:26:34 +0000

When you come right down to it, Jeff Papows argues that IT organizations have only a handful of options available to forestall this problem. They can either embark on COBOL training and an application modernization project, or they can attempt to rewrite these applications in a modern language that is thoroughly documented.