COBOL to JAVA

Java has become a very important new language for application building. Its underlying concepts are different but at the same time the same as COBOL. Both languages, from their beginning, were designed to be portable between operating systems and hardware independent. They both were designed to have code that was 'reusable'. COBOL uses copybooks and callable subroutines to create reusable code. Java uses the Classes, methods, and Applets to be reusable. There are many other similar features between COBOL and Java that contribute the conversion of COBOL to Java, this is not the time or place to list them.

Java incorporates the concepts of Object Oriented Programming where there is one definition for each data item that occurs in a system. All of its rules are defined in it's methods. It is a language that is designed for an interactive, web browser environment. It reflects the many advancements made in hardware and software over the past 40 years. COBOL was designed in a world of card input, magnetic tape storage world. We did not even think of CRTs, Mouses, disk drives, and lots of memory. COBOL's world was revolving around batch processing in machines with 16k of memory. Java will never replace COBOL nor will COBOL ever replace Java. Both will co-exist in the computer world for many years. The same data will continue to be accessed and processed by both COBOL and Java. Both languages have their strengths and weaknesses. Used together they are becoming a powerful solution in the data processing world. COBOL is far more flexible in back-end processing in the commercial environment, while Java is far more powerful in the front-end interactive web processing. To this end we are building a COBOL to Java converter.

We have been performing conversion processing for almost 15 years. We have built powerful parsers that evaluate complete systems of thousands of programs. We know what happens to each piece of data that occurs in the system. We know what each program does to each data item as it moves through the data processing cycle. 10 years ago we built into the software the ability to analyze complete systems and locate the business rules for each piece of data that occurs in the system. I guess that we were ahead of our time again, no one was interested in in the results of that type of analysis. Now we can take that information and extract it to business rules that are converted to Classes and methods that are the underlying basis for Java. We take the screen information and convert it to programs that run in the world of web browsers. With the new millennium we will be delivering the new conversion service. Currently we are testing our COBOL to Java conversion tools. They will be available as a service product in the 3rd quarter of 2002. Please contact us for further information on our conversion tools.