HP World sessions scout COBOL migration

Tools help take along valuable business logic

By Steve Hammond

Like scouts and trailblazers who waited at the head of the Santa Fe Trail to help the pioneers heading west, a number of “scouts” lined up at HP World 2003 in Atlanta to help users with COBOL applications venture toward a new environment. Three of these scouts looked ready in Atlanta to help you, the pioneer all your worldly possessions (applications) with you, bring your COBOL along as you move to the new world of Windows .NET, Unix or Linux.

To use one of the hot buzzwords of the day, the “value added” factor for porting your COBOL over to another platform lies within a company’s business rules and logic. If you do not have to rewrite those rules and logic into another language, you save a significant amount of labor. It is quite possible the institutional memory of the reason why something is done a certain way could have been lost long ago. Any migration that allows you to retain those portions of your programs saves time, not to mention grief and aggravation.

In contrast, starting from scratch means you need two skill sets: one to read and detail the COBOL logic, and a second to write that logic into the new language or create new business rules. If this is not the same individual, there will always be miscommunications or misunderstandings and the new apps will not perform as the old ones did.

Migrating COBOL may mean dealing with changes in file systems and database systems, but those can be learned. The logic of COBOL will remain the same.

Migration appears to be more and more inevitable. Luckily, the frontier town has these scouts to get us through the wilderness before the snow sets in. Here’s a summary of the offerings I saw in Atlanta. A sidebar reports on a path toward IBM’s platform that also blazes a trail for your COBOL cargo.

Pursuit of portability

Acucorp (www.acucorp.com) is one of those guides trying to lead you to the new life on a different platform, and they have what could be the most appealing feature in its AcuCOBOL-GT version 6. They claim the product was written by a COBOL programmer for COBOL programmers. Michael Jones, Business Development Manager for the Southeastern Region, told HP World attendees that AcuCOBOL-GT is “truly portable.”

“Once the code is compiled,” Jones said, “you can run it on one of 600 different operating systems.” The compiler runs on a Windows desktop environment and creates a portable object module. They claim that the compiler can handle HP COBOL II/XL source code. But like virtually every other migration tool, some tweaks are necessary to get a clean compile.

Once the module is compiled, it can be linked to any number of executables that allow it to “run” on the various flavors of Unix, Linux, the Posix shell of MPE/iX and a variety of the IBM eServers. It is capable of accessing most of the popular RDBMS data sources, including Oracle, DB2, Microsoft SQL Server and the majority of the ODBC-compliant sources.

ACUCOBOL-GT applications also read, process, and write XML documents. The product includes a utility that creates FDs and SELECT statements from existing XML files. You can then modify the FDs and SELECTs as required, and include the results in your program to prepare it for use with XML data. The runtime module includes a file system interface that reads XML data and transparently converts it to sequential files for COBOL processing.

Moving to a future

Irving Abraham of Micro Focus (www.microfocus.com) hopes that COBOL will eventually stand on equal footing with the other Web languages such as Java. “No one has just one pair of shoes,” he opined, meaning that each language has its place and COBOL should still have one, too. “COBOL has a future. We can help you plug into J2EE, .NET and Web services.”

Micro Focus offers Server Express for deployment or migration of existing 3000 COBOL applications onto new platforms. The product supports the majority of the Unix environments: those from HP, Sun, and IBM, along with Red Hat and SuSE Linux platforms.

The product includes a cross-platform compiler, several programmer productivity tools, object COBOL class libraries and user interface development tools. The compiler will create native code that is automatically optimized for each platform, multiple COBOL dialect support for ease of migration and portability between environments and platforms.

The Micro Focus Animator, an advanced debugging and analysis tool, lets programmers control the execution of a process to find errors. (Not that a COBOL programmer would ever make errors; any errors must be in the conversion by the compiler!). Server Express accesses all the leading relational databases (Oracle, Sybase, Informix and IBM). However, COBOL pre-compilers for the different databases will need to be acquired from that specific vendor.

Server Express also includes Micro Focus Dialog System, a tool that allows programmers to rapidly prototype, develop and implement character-based user interfaces on Unix, Linux and PC platforms. I found it quite significant that the product can handle large indexed files (up to 64TB), even if the base operating system does not handle such files. Micro Focus Fileshare links network files into a logical database and will allow a two-phase commit for these files spread across multiple servers.

Targeting .NET

Fujitsu (www.fujitsu.com) is another vendor looking at the COBOL market and giving those users an opportunity to take that “old dog” and teach it new tricks. Fujitsu offers its NetCOBOL for the .NET environment for Windows, for Linux, and for two flavors of Unix (HP-UX and Sun Solaris). Fujitsu is targeting the HP 3000 market with Sweet3000 for .NET, which also requires a few licenses of Fujitsu’s NetCOBOL for .NET. Sweet3000 is designed to migrate HP 3000 COBOL applications including VPlus screen IO, IMAGE databases, COBOL data files, most common HP intrinsics, and HP 3000 batch jobs. Fujitsu promised all of this “with minimal changes to your application source code.” The .NET version of Sweet3000 migrates VPlus interfaces to ASP.NET Web Forms, which helps bring GUI Web-browser style interfaces to applications.

As for Sweet3000, the Fujitsu Web site reports a list price of $84,500 for training and mentoring two developers (in Ohio), a software toolkit for two developers, one database server interface, and 40 hours of phone support. The toolkit includes a COBOL source converter that automates converting the COBOL II code to NetCOBOL, and database migration utilities to unload data from the 3000 and load it into the appropriate file formats for the migrated application. These migration utilities support IMAGE data as well as standard COBOL data files. You also get equivalents to most 3000 intrinsics and a command processor that enables the migration of most batch jobs to the new environment.

Fujitsu’s toolkit has equivalent subroutines for almost 100 HP 3000 intrinsics, including most of the database intrinsics. Fujitsu also offers to help with any intrinsics which are not available; they said “especially since more are being developed, and it is quite possible that there may be a subroutine in development for that particular intrinsic.”

The exact IMAGE database schemas are used to create the data definition files for use in the .NET environment. Extracted data can be loaded into relational databases including SQL Server, Oracle, Sybase, Informix, DB2 and Raima. You can access Eloquence via an ODBC link. KSAM, relative and message files are also loaded into a database to maintain the integrity of the data.

As far as file IO behavior goes, Sweet3000 provides the supporting routines that guarantee HP 3000 behavior is duplicated. Overall, if you are looking at the .NET environment, Fujitsu and Sweet3000 provide a good means of getting there.