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Ken-
Careful - after Levi sells off their Dockers division, they might just start
again with bell bottoms.
In reality there is more than a sizable investment in COBOL prior to
recent years. Anyone who has done serious infrastructure work on
production systems has had to deal with existing COBOL systems.
In both dollar terms, and in person-hours, there is more investment
in COBOL than any other language or environment surviving today.
So it makes some economic sense in some cases to invest a little more
in the existing systems rather than invest a lot to rewrite.
ISO updating the COBOL standard added a lot more than supporting the
object paradigm to the language, precisely so existing code could be
extended with little effort. And there is, in the recent COBOL2002, an
addendum coming for COBOL to deal with XML in COBOL syntax. In addition to
the mainframe z/OS (and predecessors), Fujitsu and Micro Focus both sell
COBOL compilers compatible with .NET, and there is a ton of COBOL running on
linux/unix. AcuCobol claimed over 600 platforms, but I don't think MSDOS
counts anymore.
This stuff is actually market demand driven. So in a sense, watching where
COBOL goes is actually a proxy for listening to the customer. If COBOL
seems to be having resurgence, there is some message there.
If you couldn't tell, I'm a COBOL supporter - my bank processes accounts in
COBOL, stock company processes buy/sell in COBOL, VISA processes
debit/credit in COBOL, my telephone bill (inaccurate as it is) is processed
in COBOL, etc etc.
So, again - watch Levi. If they begin to sell bell bottoms - buy.
Barry
Barry Tauber ( btauber@interaccess.com) 847-267-8011
-----Original Message-----
From: Ken North [mailto:kennorth@sbcglobal.net]
Sent: Thursday, May 13, 2004 10:12 PM
To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
Subject: [xml-dev] XML moves COBOL into the .NET and J2EE arenas
In the recent standards thread, there was some discussion of the continuing
evolution of COBOL (Deutsche Bank using COBOL with XML, ISO updating the
COBOL
standard, Micro Focus selling a COBOL for .NET).
Now IBM has announced a COBOL for developers in the enterprise Java arena.
It
uses XML bi-directionally.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/05/11/HNcobol_1.html
"Developers can write EJB in Cobol 3.3 on WebSphere z/OS, which is the
mainframe
version of the WebSphere application server."
There's been a sizable investment in COBOL in recent years. First Y2K, now
for
XML, NET and EJB.
emacs, SGML, COBOL and the Mini Cooper. Hmm. Probably time to invest in a
company making bell bottom pants.
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