* Micro Focus’ Net Express recasts COBOL programs as Web services
My first brush with COBOL was many moons ago, when I was working as an assembler programmer on an ICL 1903A mainframe. Ah, those heady days of wading through acres of spaghetti code. The whole purpose of the software I wrangled was to reformat data stored on paper and magnetic tape (the reason why is a story unto itself that we will leave for another day).
Well, eventually we decided that something needed to be done about this rat’s nest masquerading as a program, and some bright spark suggested COBOL. The result was remarkable. We had a data division for each input format and one more for output. The entire COBOL program proper simply moved one data division to another.
So there we had a solution: simple, elegant and very maintainable.
And very, very, very slow. About 10 or 20 times slower than the assembler version, which meant it would never meet our production schedules. But it was an interesting exercise.
While COBOL never cracked that particular problem I suspect that my former employers (a big hello to anyone from OEG at HMS Warrior who might read this) still have many other programs that are written in COBOL and that are still used today. You may be in the same situation.
So what to do when you have all of that legacy code but you want to move the business processes that code embodies to the Web services world? Unless you have deep pockets, migrating to another language such as C or Java is usually not feasible. Thus the question becomes how to bend COBOL to fit in.
An answer is Micro Focus Net Express (see links below). Micro Focus is the grand old man of the COBOL world, and Net Express provides direct COBOL Web services capabilities, Java 2 Enterprise Edition connectivity and XML support – allowing integration of existing COBOL applications into Web services platforms.
The company claims a COBOL component can be transformed into a Web service with no additional programming.
Net Express consists of an integrated development environment that provides object-oriented extensions and automated tools to map COBOL logic to Web services.
Net Express creates COBOL Web services by mapping COBOL interfaces to the Microsoft Component Object Model, Java classes or Enterprise JavaBean components. These services are then deployed with the Windows-based Micro Focus Enterprise Server – a Java 2 platform – for delivery to Microsoft .Net clients, Java environments and other Web-enabled COBOL applications.
Micro Focus Net Express, which is bundled with a non-production version of the Micro Focus Enterprise Server, costs $3,700 per developer seat.
