COBOL Modernization and Development Under Linux

by Rich Smrcina
August 1, 2009

Given COBOL’s humble beginnings in 1959, few would have imagined it would become one of the most enduring and continuously improved computer languages.

Still Productive

Many articles have been written predicting the death of COBOL. Many businesses have tried to convert their substantial arsenal of COBOL code to various languages on other platforms at great expense. Some have succeeded; many have failed.

In the May 28, 2009, article, “Happy Birthday COBOL! 50 Years Old and Still Kicking Butt,” Jon Erickson states that an estimated 60 to 80 percent of the world’s enterprises rely on COBOL to run their businesses and that 200 billion lines of COBOL code are in use globally. Erickson goes on to cite a Micro Focus survey, which indicates that Americans use a COBOL program an average of 13 times a day for things related to cell phones, credit card use, or commuting.

Still other survey results show a positive side to the debate, as many sites are still writing new applications using COBOL. Some sources indicate that 5 billion lines of new COBOL code are written every year. Not bad for a dead language.

A March 10, 2008, Infoworld article, “The 7 Dirtiest Jobs in IT,” states that among skill requests for Peoplesoft and WebSphere, the same job postings are requesting COBOL skills. The article confirms the high cost of rewriting applications and reusing existing code through Web services. This just skims the surface on the importance of COBOL to the industry.

Putting on a New Face

COBOL vendors such as Micro Focus and Fujitsu have added Microsoft .NET functionality to the language. This provides a way to integrate COBOL with the .NET framework and other .NET languages. Both COBOL vendors also provide Object-Oriented (OO) capabilities in their products.

In the article, “COBOL Comeback” by Deirdre Blake, she states that object-oriented COBOL incorporates basic principles such as inheritance, polymorphism, and encapsulation. Additionally, common exception handling and increased portability of arithmetic are key elements of the first draft of the OO standard. It was designed to allow developers an easy migration to OO COBOL from procedural COBOL.

COBOL doesn’t simply provide the means to execute programs in a batch or multi-step process environment. Combined with the CICS programming and debugging model, programs become interactive on both terminal sessions and Web browsers.

CICS Transaction Server on System z has had Web support since 1997. CICS Web Support (CWS) lets a programmer optionally modify applications to use a Web browser. This capability extends the CICS Application Programming Interface (API) and provides specific functional run-time capabilities so CICS acts somewhat like a Web server and can serve applications.

Tools are available to transform mainframe screen data to display on a Web browser. There are several products in this class, and each of their implementation characteristics differ somewhat. A few of these tools aren’t based on, nor do they require, CICS; they simply act on 3270 data. As such, they’re operating system-agnostic. Here’s a brief look at three of these products: