Anyone still creating new apps in COBOL?

posted by Allan@TechCrammer @ 2:14am, Wednesday 31 December 2008.

OK, it has been a long time since I have dug into some COBOL code and honestly, even then, I was only in training to do some routine maintenance and never really had the initiative to create a full blown application. So lets just leave it that I am not an expert in any manner with COBOL. So why am I writing about it?

Well for two reasons: The first being that I do find the language fascinating and kind of wonder why it is considered a dinosaur by most programmers I meet? I may have kept up with COBOL, but honestly it is a very niche programming field and I think have more exposure to Web related languages (Perl/ASP/PHP/CSS/JavaScript) allowed more doors to open for occupational choices.

The second reason is that I am working with a company that has, over the past few years, been updating some segments of hardware/software and one of those was a legacy COBOL application that used a very slick (for its time) environment called ICHOST from a company called Envyr Corporation. Let me add that I am not affiliated with this company in anyway, though certainly appreciate their product. From their website it looks like the ICHOST platform (running on DOS) was discontinued back in 1997, though they have a new ICOBOL platform which has some fantastic features which I am going to get into.

To get back to the migration to our new software, I guess I was kind of shocked when the developer told me the new application was also written in COBOL, which obviously explains why we are now also using an upgraded COBOL environment. I would have assumed it was just re-written in .NET or at least a Visual Basic application, so it took me awhile for this to sink in. I thought to myself, "So on these newly acquired servers that we just spent thousands of dollars for, we are going to run this COBOL application?" which just seemed odd at first.

The developer which created the software we are using, was kind enough to fly down and speak more to us about his new application and also the new ICOBOL platform he was coding on, and I really got excited. The new environment allows me to get rid of my old "dumb terminals" and I can interface through a small runtime on any of my regular workstations. Also a quick comment, it is also supposed to run on Linux (yet another plus in my book) though we currently have it all in Windows.

This also means that I don't need all those serial cables running everywhere, just my regular network. There is an add-on module (cgiCOBOL) that allows the developer to pass information to a CGI script and comes up in my IIS webserver. I am not sure how all this works and is just magic to me, though the developer said its pretty easy to code for. And the even better news is that you can get ODBC access into those COBOL database structures. So if you had an external ASP or PHP program you can get into the COBOL database through this driver.

Some of the original cool features I remember from the older version are still there such as the print spooler and menu modification; and I am sure there are alot of new underlying code hooks that have been added to aid in programming. I don't have access to the source code of our application from our software vendor. Though it would be nice to write some sample code to just get a feel for it. I think he said you have to buy a separate developers license from Envyr as well.

The other really nice feature is that you can use a graphical or text interface. Believe it or not, many people I work with prefer the nice clean, and fast, text interface.

There are different pricing structures for the licensing of the enviroment and then we had to purchase the application that was written for us, using this platform. Though I think it was well worth it and a very stable platform from what we have experienced with our application.

Long live COBOL!

-Allan

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•