Saving Cobol

IBM estimates that more than 30 billion transactions occur within Cobol programs every day. By contrast, Google averages about 150 million searches each day, or about .5% of Cobol's daily workload. No one worries about Google (well, maybe stockholders who bought their shares north of $700, heck, $600), but people still fret about Cobol's future.

Micro Focus Ltd. of Newbury, England has published a list of "misconceptions" about the hoary language to set the record straight about its usefulness. And Craig Marble, senior solutions engineer at Micro Focus, worries that IT gets absorbed in "sexier" languages like Java and .NET and might overlook Cobol's criticality to business. So, he doesn't want enterprises embarking on service-oriented architecture projects to exclude Cobol in their development plans. SOA, he says, "brings Cobol up to the same level as .NET and Java."

What hurts Cobol in SOA deployments, Marble argues, is when developers simply screen scrape data and overlook the vital business logic behind the data. He says because so many Cobol apps are built on complex business rules, that screen scraping techniques for Web apps can slow response time to a crawl. By bringing Cobol into the SOA effort in the beginning, he claims, you can create Web services that execute within the Cobol backend environment with results handled by Java or .NET on the front end.

The key advantage with Cobol, Marble says, is that it is ideal for creating the business rules because it is an English language-based programming tool. He says even business analysts can read extant business logic in Cobol.

And that raises another Cobol concern, contends Jerry Sitner, a Cobol consultant in New York. He says the original intent of Cobol to be written in straight English terms has been subverted by management. Sitner argues that managers have pushed developers to crank out code quickly. As such, he says, developers have undermined the value of English in Cobol by introducing abbreviations. For example, instead of writing "Patient" or "Medicare" for fields in a Cobol program, rushed developers shortened them to "Pat" or "Med" and make it difficult to know exactly what each abbreviation means, especially for legacy code being reviewed by anyone other than the original Cobol programmer. Sitner doubts those business analysts Marble refers to will have an easy time decoding hasty abbreviations. He's on a one-man mission to fix what he calls "broken Cobol." So, call him at 212 254-3358. Maybe he can help your organization speak fluent Cobol.

Related Articles:

• Confessions of a Cobol programmer
• The 8 Hottest Skills for '08
• The top 10 dead (or dying) computer skills