COBOL: And Then Some

Subsequent to my mentioning COBOL in a pair of posts -- COBOL: 'Nuf Said and again in COBOL: Job 1 -- a bunch of you jumped in to fill in the gaps.

For instance, the folks at Micro Focus pointed out that 75 percent of the world's business apps run in COBOL, and that analysts claim that up to 80 percent of IT budgets now go for maintaining old code. Citing a recent industry survey, 62 percent of the respondents used COBOL and 58 percent were creating new applications in COBOL.

Micro Focus was also quick to add that it has just unveiled its Net Express 5.0, a development environment that extends core business processes to the .NET Framework and other distributed platforms. Using Net Express, you can construct enterprise components and services from existing business logic and use these to develop new Microsoft .NET, web, or client/server apps across the distributed enterprise.

Additionally, the folks at EvolveWare were kind enough to provide more details on the project I mentioned, in which 325,000 lines of COBOL code was migrated to .NET. The system chosen for migration involved the California Unemployment Insurance Scheduling System, which was comprised of two subsystems--a 60,000 line COBOL/CICS/VSAM system, and a 265,000 line COBOL/CICS/DB2 one.

The 60,000 line sub-system was documented and transformed into AllFusion Gen model by EvolveWare's COBOL-2-AllFusion Gen tool in three effort weeks, including QA and verification. The documentation was 100 percent automated and the transformation rate was 78 percent automated. An additional five effort weeks were taken to complete the transformation manually. Once all the code had been transformed into AllFusion Gen models, Java/DB2 code was generated automatically by AllFusion Gen. This code was then deployed in a test environment successfully.

The 265,000 line sub-system was documented and transformed into AllFusion Gen model by EvolveWare’s COBOL-2-AllFusion Gen tool in eight effort weeks including QA and verification. The documentation was 100 percent automated and the transformation rate was 87 percent automated. Currently the AllFusion Gen model is being completed for unconverted code and the entire system is being enhanced manually to include new functionality. This manual effort is expected to take approximately 25 effort weeks. Once all the COBOL code has been transformed and enhanced, C#Net/SQL Server code will be automatically generated by AllFusion Gen. This code will then be deployed in a test environment with the expected date for deployment being January, 2007, eight months after the kick-off date. It is estimated that manually this project would have taken
at least 18-24 months for completion.

Arq. Agustin Zabala was kind enough to send me a note from Buenos Aires that his group are all COBOL teachers and their web site is all COBOL; see http://www.cobol.com.ar.

Likewise, Bruce Hogman provided a vertiable trove of COBOL information. According to Gartner, Bruce reports, there are 250 billion lines of COBOL source code being used, with 15 billion new lines each year. A major AAA national company has some 35,000 COBOL modules plus supporting COPY books and so on in its inventory. A major airlines has 848 COBOL modules in its crew management system with some 3,000,000+ SLOC of code. Merrill-Lynch runs 70 percent of its daily business on COBOL systems.

The Navy named a guided missile destroyer after Adm. Grace Murray Hopper (in 1958 one of those who set COBOL on its path to world domination by giving the language to ANSI standards committee to govern). COBOL's main claim to fame is its distinction of possessing the only programming language whose standard defines handling of decimal currency. A standard conforming compiler therefore handles a bank's funds correctly. Indirectly, this is also why banks offer daily compounding of interest to their customers rather than doing the calculations only every quarter. Due to the bank rounding, pennies are carved off interest to pay interest bearing accounts each time the interest is calculated and added to the accounts. As Bruce says, a penny here and there adds up for millions of customers.

Recently, he goes on to say, one of the world's largest software companies and a partner delivered some 12,000 COBOL modules as new product to a major insurance company.

COBOL can now do object-oriented development with its 2002 (former draft 1997) standard language. IBM has implemented that feature in its Enterprise COBOL for z/OS.

I taught COBOL in 3 days to experienced C++ programmers who found it very easy to understand, so we fielded many people to remediate code for Y2K. I was forward in my thinking and solved a large insurance company's Y2K problem in 1968 when rewriting their master file update program and convinced their VP for data processing that they planned to be in business in 2000, so why not address the data problem while we had time. Since they had life policies with a similar century window already, they decided to solve all their problems and expanded the dates universally and also stored all the dates using ISO dates to make date sorting easy.

Bruce closes in noting that "if we could only get world-wide corporations to run their systems on UTC as well as use ISO dates, we could avoid all sorts of confusion."

And on that note, I'll close too. Thanks to everyone for filling the gaps.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 04:13 PM  Permalink