Dr. Dobb's Journal - October 2008 - (Page 18)

D10lead_p2ds.qxp 8/15/08 10:40 AM Page 18 Strategic Vision IS YOUR NEXT LANGUAGE COBOL? implementation within .NET, Crook says, “is on a par with any other .NET language in terms of capability.” All this, Crook says, adds up to making businesses more agile in squeezing value from their IT assets and delivering more value to the business. For this reason, Cobol “will continue to evolve by retaining a simple focus on delivering agility to the market.” And what is sexier than agility? Cobol, Gateway To the Web? Th i s i s t h e q u i et r e a l i ty … Th e b u s i n ess wo r l d r u n s o n Co b o l But there’s a sexier reason to learn Cobol than just to maintain or port old code. Cobol is a key element in the realization of modern distributed business software architecture concepts— XML/metadata, Web Services, Service Oriented Architecture—and e-business. Not a trendy element, or you’d see Cobol sessions at the next Web 2.0 conference. But a crucial element. Lemmel sees the essence of metadata in Cobol’s IDENTIFICATION and ENVIRONMENT sections and of Web Services in its CICS transactions. The very concept of a Cobol application is something of an oversimplification. Cobol programmers work with a collection of technologies tied together in ways that have some similarities to SOA models. Scott McMahan in an e-mail says, “If you want to understand modern Cobol, it’s a glue language. IBM has a ‘stack’ of technologies for data processing like CICS, DB2, IMS, VSAM, ISPF, etc., which are glued together using Cobol.” The role of the Cobol programmer in moving from traditional implementations to web-based models can take many forms. The programmer may bridge between Cobol code and new apps, which requires understanding Cobol, the business rules underlying legacy Cobol code, and modern languages and systems. With the emergence of SOA and IBM’s Language Environment, with its common runtime environment, existing Cobol code can be integrated with other code more easily. The tools available for integrating Cobol and the Web are evolving quickly. Veryant is making it possible to do Web 2.0 development directly in Cobol: “the same graphical resizing of windows that is part of most Web applications today is now easily implemented for Cobol program end users.” Micro Focus, through its partnership with Microsoft, is developing strong SOA support for Cobol app development. And Fujitsu considers its support for allowing Cobol programmers to program directly to the Web “several steps forward” beyond migrating code. You can, for example, embed Cobol code in ASP+ pages or write Web Services directly in Cobol. “This is the quiet reality,” Crook says, “the business world runs on Cobol [and] Cobol today is a very modern language that continues to leverage its historical strengths for delivering new value to the business fast.” DDJ 18 Dr. Dobb’s Journal l www.ddj.com l October 2008 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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