COBOL thoughts

About 3/4 of all Enterprise data is processed by COBOL applications.

Have you moved yet to the consolidated run-time environment LE (Language Environment), which hikes up performance, connectivity and functionality for applications written in COBOL (and PL/1, FORTRAN, Assembler and C) and is now a prerequisite for z/OS. If the answer is no then you are a bit behind the times and if you want some help then one company worth a look at is Blue Pheonix who have COBOL/LE-Enabler.

Recommended: Mainframe COBOL programing book Murach's Mainframe COBOL. Focuses on IBM Mainframe COBOL - well structured, excellent manual. Also worth a read is an article by Mike Murach on The Future of COBOL

I recently re-read an interesting 2003 article at eweek - Peter Coffee's Is COBOL the 18-Wheeler of the Web? with some statistics of note: 15% of new applications are COBOL , "The most highly paid programmers in the next ten years are going to be COBOL programmers who know the Internet" (GIGA). I'm not sure this entirely fits in with todays SOA world - I'd be interested in views on this.

More COBOL musings soon

WH May 2006