Dr. Dobb's Journal - October 2008 - (Page 17)

D10lead_p2ds.qxp 8/15/08 10:35 AM Page 17 data processing is Cobol. Merril Lynch reports that 70 percent of its business runs on Cobol apps. Five out of eight companies with an IT manager use Cobol, most of them using it a lot. One estimate puts the value of current running Cobol code at $2 trillion. (In addition to the Gartner Group, some of the above figures come from Computerworld, Ovum, and Micro Focus International.) And it’s not just legacy code. Billions of lines of new Cobol code are being written every year. Cobol apps are typically very large, a million lines being common, and partly for that reason they are also long-lived. It’s cheaper to maintain the code than to replace it, and 40-year-old Cobol applications are often extremely well debugged (although anyone who was bit by the Y2K date bug, primarily a Cobol problem, might disagree). Cobol Coders An Endangered Species In fact, the code is outliving its coders. As long-time Cobol coders die or retire, they are not being replaced. Few schools teach Cobol any more. And demand is still strong. If your business depends on Cobol, you are facing some choices. Whether you’re actively developing new Cobol apps, just maintaining the old, or trying to move away from Cobol, you need Cobol expertise. You can: 1) keep your current Cobol programmers happy and employed while you scramble to wean your business off Cobol; 2) try to find younger Cobol programmers to replace those you’ll be losing; or 3) push your current programming staff to learn Cobol. Replacing Cobol entirely can be an expensive proposition, and many companies (and State governments) have for decades thought it cheaper to keep it. Still, many businesses are moving away from Cobol, or saying that they will if and when they can. Some big companies are replacing at least some of their legacy Cobol apps with packaged software from Oracle and other companies. But a quartertrillion lines of code does not get replaced overnight. Cobol programmers are needed. Micro Focus and IBM have tried to nudge universities to train more Cobol programmers, offering free courseware and technology, but this hasn’t resulted in a huge flood of new Cobol programmers. So adding Cobol to your toolkit does make you more employable. And you can definitely do better than minimum wage. B i l l i o n s of l i n e s o f n ew Co b o l co d e a re b e i n g w r i tte n e v e r y ye a r Author and Cloud Architect Lewis Cunningham says, Yes, if you make it run on a JVM. That’s what Veryant (www.veryant.com) has done. Its Cobol Application Platform Suite translates Cobol source, written in a GUI on your preferred platform, into Java classes that are executed with the Java Virtual Machine. The Cobol Runtime Environment is implemented in Java, making the code highly portable. Cunningham says, “I hope I never have to code Cobol again. But if I do, I would at least want it to be portable.” Porting Cobol code can be a huge task, but Cobol itself may be the most portable programming language. The Eclipse Foundation has a project to develop a fully functional Cobol IDE for the Eclipse platform (www.eclipse.org/cobol). “Our focus,” they say, “is Cobol application development on Windows/Solaris/Linux for deployment on each platform.” And IBM, Microsoft, Fujitsu, Micro Focus, and Veryant are major players in making Cobol maximally portable. Micro Focus (www.microfocus.com) produces nonmainframe tools for understanding, porting, and developing Cobol code, and products that support native implementations of CICS, JCL, and IMS DB/TM on Windows, UNIX, and Linux. Micro Focus embraces the “own dogfood” principle: Gary Crook, Micro Focus’s Worldwide Vice President, Product Development, says, “the very core of our product set, the Cobol compiler, is itself written entirely in Cobol and we use our own Cobol for the development of new features and products.” Last year, Micro Focus and Microsoft announced a strategic relationship to help businesses modernize Cobol apps by porting them to the Windows platform, so a lot of Micro Focus development happens in the world of .NET, J2EE, and Web 2.0. Micro Focus’s Cobol October 2008 l www.ddj.com l Dr. Dobb’s Journal Not Your Father’s Cobol You’ll find, if you decide to take a look at Cobol, that it has become in many ways a truly modern language. The 1985 standard introduced structured programming and the 2002 standard gave Cobol objectoriented capability. In 2005, Ralf Lammel and Kris De Schutter demonstrated that even classic, preobject-oriented Cobol, was well suited for aspect-oriented programming (homepages.cwi.nl/~ralf/ AspectCobol). Modern implementations demonstrate that Cobol can play well with other languages and technologies on their playgrounds. Nevertheless, Cobol is still verbose, still very 1959 in its syntax, still—Cobol. Is there any way to make programming in Cobol sexy? 17 http://www.veryant.com http://www.eclipse.org/cobol http://www.microfocus.com http://homepages.cwi.nl/~ralf/AspectCobol http://homepages.cwi.nl/~ralf/AspectCobol http://www.ddj.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Dr. Dobb's Journal - October 2008

Dr. Dobb's Journal - October 2008 Contents Friday Night Fish Fry Alia Vox Developer Diaries Developer’s Notebook Is Your Next Language COBOL? Conversations Safe Coding Practices Code Signing in Adobe AIR OpenID Single Sign-On The Book Cipher Algorithm Indexing and Searching Image files Extending Continuous Integration Into ALM The Agile Edge Effective Concurrency Swaine’s Flames

Dr. Dobb's Journal - October 2008

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