Cyrus Montakab Blog

COBOL programmer salaries up by 43% in 1 year

See IT Job Watch site. Here is my ideas on the reasons for this increase ...

Microfocus's increasing license costs & Legacy Modernization

Legacy Modernization focus is changing faster from Rehosting to translation - thanks to the ever increasing Microfocus license costs.

From COBOL Data-Types to Java/C# Primitive data-types

This is a continuation of my earlier blog - asking what would be the desirable characteristics of a COBOL program - rewritten in OO Java or C#. I followed that post with a description of first steps to go from Structured data definitions into an Object-Oriented design.

In this posting, we'll look at what can happen to all the data-items, COBOL redefinitions, COMP variables and etc.

Happy 50th Birthday to COBOL

People get very religious about Computing languages. C# vs Java, VB vs Delphi, C++ and LISP. But quite frankly, I somehow never expected developers to treat COBOL as a religion: No object-orientation (not one which has been accepted or used), no exception handling, and allowing lots of bad practices: GO-TOs, REDEFINES ...

COBOL Business Rule projects are large projects

Question is how bigger would the project become if they migrated to “maintainable” Java first? Would they have to migrate the whole thing – or just parts which is destined to be re-written as rules? Depending on the COBOL platform (IBM, ESQL, UNISYS – DMS-II, ….), it is possible to have part of the system in Java and leave the rest COBOL ...

Business Rules in Legacy Modernization

Here at SoftwareMining, we get two types of interest in Business rules. In the first instance there are projects who simply want to re document the system or re-produce a functional specification for the purpose of rewrite. The 2nd set of interest is from organizations who would like to re-implement their system within a “rule-based” system. This COBOL rule-systems is the topic of my dicussion today.

James Taylor, writes an interesting blog on "Modernizing COBOL with business rules" ...

COBOL Re-host vs COBOL Translation (to Legible Java or C#)

Recently there has been a lot of activity in the Re-hosting world, as evident in quarterly reports of MicroFocus as well as the big rehosting companies.

But why would anyone rehost as oppose to translate? lets look at the pros and cons of each solution ...

Is COBOL Dead? or will there be COBOL code on starship Enterprise?

In the 60's, the list of companies in the Fortune 500 was so stable that it took 20 years for a third of them to change. Now it takes only four years (source: The Economist). There is a lot of pressure for businesses are to remain competitive.

Will COBOL survive such business needs? ...

Oracle takeover of Sun

Surely this is good !!! If IBM had bought Sun, the big players in Server market would have been IBM and HP only.

I read that Sun's list of open-source Software (Java and MySQL) was a major factor in influencing the purchase ...

From COBOL Data-Section to an OO Design

This is a continuation of my earlier blog - asking what would be the desirable characteristics of a COBOL program - rewritten in OO Java or C#.

In the first step we discussed the necessity for Semantic Translation.

In the next section I would like to discuss the importance of OO in design of data-sections. (I will discuss OO in business logic section a bit later).

Green Shoots of recovery .... too early ?

For first quarter of 2009 - Goldman reported $1.8 Billion, JPMorgan reported a net profit of $2.14 billion, and Wells-Fargo is expected to make $3 billion quarterly profit.
Meanwhile, Intel's net earning is down - but better than expected.

Does all this point to the green shoots of recovery ?

Semantic translation - First requirement for generation of "Maintainable" Code

In my yesterday's blog, I asked what would be the desirable characteristics for a COBOL program re-written in Java or C#? It doesn't really matter whether the process is achieved in a manual rewrite, or through automatic translation. But the amount of time and budget allocated to the system matters a lot. If there was a BIG budget and a lot of time, you could end-up with an "ideal" solution (or run over-time and budget, and have the project cancelled).

So, without further ado, here is the major characteristic:

Satyam auctioned - Tech Mahindra is new owner

Ok, I know this is not exactly legacy modernization issue ... but it is still interesting.

Resistence is Futile ... You will be Translated

Various reports suggest that the COBOL code base is still growing between 3 to 5% per year. The past Legacy modernization projects have only touched the tip of the iceburg.

The modernization projects to-date has mostly started due to an immediate "necessity" such as business process changes. In this situation, where budgets allowed, it made sense to re-document, extract the rules, re-design and rewrite. My company - SoftwareMining we also produce business rule extraction tools for this market. But in this discussion, I want to focus on Translations.