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Web-based COBOL resources

By Shawn M. Gordon

I thought I would spend a little time this month talking about COBOL-related Web sites that I have found interesting, and some news I’ve heard. First, I’d like to share my personal favorite list of Web sites.

Topping my list is www.infogoal.com/cbd/cb dhome.htm, which touts itself as the COBOL Center, and based on the links it has, this is a great place to start. Any COBOL books you are looking for, or COBOL news or compilers — there’s just a whole ton of good stuff here.

At www.netins.net/showcase/e tsinc, these guys seem to have a bunch of COBOL add-on stuff, especially for doing Windows-type development. They seem more tied to RM/COBOL than anything, but it might be worth looking into.

Want to know more about Object Oriented COBOL? Then take a look at http://extra.newsguy ..com/~oocobol/home.htm. This seems to be the hot spot for finding books and information on the latest stuff.

I am forever disappointed with the Windows versions of COBOL compilers — they still don’t seem to get it. At HP World last year I spoke with Acucobol and was getting very excited about what they were talking about, but the reality didn’t live up to the hype. No one ever seems to be able to come up with a straightforward method of building GUI COBOL apps that are Web deployable, at least in a reasonable fashion.

Despite that complaint, below are some of the vendors you should probably check out if you are thinking you may want to do client-server COBOL work with ODBC or JDBC.

Acucobol : These folks used to support their COBOL on the HP 3000, but they seem to have dropped it. The biggest issue was that the only file system they seemed to work with was their Vision file format, which if I recall correctly is similar to KSAM. They never supported IMAGE, so it was hard to get anyone excited about it. They run on a bazillion different platforms though, so it’s usually worth looking at.

Fujitsu PowerCobol : If you also check out the www.adtools.com/i nfo/wpapers/index.htm link, you can read the about the COBOL 2000 standard that is coming soon, as well as the Object Oriented extensions.

Now that MicroFocus and Intersolv have merged and are known as Merant. They don’t seem to be pushing the COBOL as hard any more, but I could be wrong — it’s just that the focus of their Web site and marketing materials are not as clear as they used to be. MicroFocus is another company whose products used to run on the 3000, but the 3000 seemed to be treated with indifference. The problem with both MicroFocus and Acucobol is that they require a run-time license fee — because they have a run-time environment file that describes the display attributes of the system they are running on.

Synkronix is the company that offers PERCobol, which is its COBOL-to-Java translator. They are very MPE-centric, and I will be doing a review real soon now. I’ve been looking at their product for over a year now and have been getting more and more interested, but was waiting for a few new features to come out. Now that version 2.2 is out, I think it will be time to review it soon, so look for it before the end of the year.

Liant RM Cobol: They’ve built something called Van GUI which originally was supposed to be a nice visual interface to their COBOL environment, but now it seems to have evolved into some sort of plug-in for Delphi and Visual Basic. I’ve never been very clear on how it’s supposed to work, and the Web site doesn’t explain a lot.

There is a fun little freeware COBOL interpreter at www.deskware.com/cobol/ cobol.htm. It doesn’t support all of the ANSI85 standard, and I don’t know what their plans are for the future, but it’s something to play and learn with.

The biggest problem with all the COBOL vendor sites is that they are short on meat and devoid of easily-found downloads or screen snapshots.

There is an interesting rumor of a product that will eventually be at www.kobol.net, but at deadline there wasn’t anything there yet. I will keep you posted.

Shawn Gordon, whose S.M. Gordon & Associates firm supplies HP 3000 utilities, has worked with 3000s since 1983.