Kobol carries low-cost Linux flag

HP 3000 veteran Shawn Gordon left the MPE fold a few years ago. He saw computing taking a different direction and created a company called simply The Kompany (www.thekompany.com) in 1999. The Kompany’s Web site tells us that it is “a growing and rapidly developing company with a focus on multi-platform software for enterprise, developers and embedded devices.”

The MPE expatriate gravitated to the Linux operating system and found a niche there. “A lot of things that people like about the e3000 are there on Linux,” said Gordon recently. “You can build a decent server for a thousand dollars and then run Linux on it. Linux is like MPE, it’s a very stable OS. It just doesn’t go down.”

Realizing that over 80 percent of the business-oriented source code in the US is still in COBOL, The Kompany developed Kobol, a fully ANSI-compliant COBOL compiler for Linux, HP-UX and Windows. For HP 3000 users looking to move to a new platform, the compiler is very reasonably priced. Add on its MPE compatibility module, which includes support for macros and defined octal constants, and Allegro’s Intrins/iX (currently available for the HP-UX platform, and soon for Linux), and it’s still reasonable enough to purchase and not have your CFO blow out a bypass. A debugger is also available for obvious purposes.

Kobol uses the standard COBOL syntax, so COBOL developers need only learn the nuances of the platform instead of trying to determine how this version of the language functions. The compiler creates executable code, taking advantage of the associated performance benefits. Gordon reports that one of his customers converted, tested and implemented over 100,000 lines of COBOL code on Linux in the matter of just a few months with only two programmers. Kobol also currently works with Eloquence. The next version of Kobol, available this summer, will come with SQL-preprocessor directives for a consistent interface to such database systems as MySQL, PostgreSQL, xBase, IBM’s DB2, Oracle and ODBC.