It is generally agreed that COBOL programs make up anywhere from 50-75% of the world’s current business applications. Today COBOL programmers need a modern, powerful, and easy to use development environment that fully exploits the Microsoft Windows family of operating systems for both development and production.
The Microsoft Windows family of operating systems has become the preferred end user platform for the vast majority of PC users. A number of pitfalls arose, however, as traditional COBOL programmers from the mainframe world attempted to embrace this exciting new platform.
Primarily, the intense time and complexity of low level Windows API (application programming interface) programming prevents most developers from creating sophisticated graphical user interfaces using traditional 3GL (3rd generation language) compilers and tools.
Two approaches have been developed to deal with this problem. The first is to extend the COBOL language itself to encompass GUI capability directly in the language. This approach offers the advantage of using a single COBOL development environment, and keeping the entire application in native COBOL. Fujitsu’s flagship PowerCOBOL product is the best example of such an approach.
The second approach is to separate the user interface from the actual COBOL application and have it managed by a wholly separate facility. Some COBOL vendors have attempted to deliver such a combination, but these have fallen short for a variety of reasons. Primarily, these environments have proven to be highly unstable, lacking in many features, and very proprietary in nature. Additionally, these environments have been in a constant state of flux as vendors attempted to deliver better stability and a wider array of functionality. The results have typically been less than successful for developers.
In recognizing these challenges, Fujitsu has developed the world’s premier COBOL GUI and client/server application development environment -- Fujitsu’s flagship PowerCOBOL product line.
Fujitsu has also recognized the need for a world class COBOL development product that will integrate, coexist and exploit Microsoft’s Visual Basic development environment.
If you want to develop full-fledged GUI applications, you should explore Fujitsu’s PowerCOBOL product. If you have the Professional or Enterprise editions of NetCOBOL, you have probably already installed the product. If you have NetCOBOL Standard edition, you can check the NetCOBOL web site (www.netcobol.com) for more details. You may additionally use Microsoft’s Visual Basic (version 4.0 or later) with this product to develop GUI applications.
Visual Basic was an attempt to bring out a 4GL-like development environment that would allow programmers and even non-programmers to develop GUI applications in the Windows environment. Users could visually ‘paint’ the user interface, and then create the rest of the application by writing small snippets of code using a proprietary scripting language that was loosely based upon the BASIC programming language.
Initially, Visual Basic was lacking for serious business application development. Microsoft has continued to evolve Visual Basic over the years into a serious development environment. Today it is a strong development tool for a wide number of professional developers who want to rapidly create GUI applications for the Windows family of platforms.
For the users of COBOL applications, however, Visual Basic presents a number of substantial challenges:
Having no relationship to COBOL, Visual Basic presents an alien development environment to COBOL programmers. They must learn an entirely new development methodology and language.
Visual Basic does not provide all of the facilities found in the COBOL language.
Prior to NetCOBOL, Visual Basic could not easily be inter-mixed with COBOL programs to combine the best of both worlds, and to allow the re-use of existing COBOL programs.
Many COBOL programmers have requirements to re-host applications (move COBOL applications from another platform such as the mainframe) to the PC environment. At the same time they want to re-design traditional text-based interfaces to take advantage of GUI.
While some COBOL vendors attempted to provide ‘bridges’ to allow Visual Basic to intermingle with COBOL, these approaches typically fell short.
One of the major inhibiting factors in inter-mixing other vendor’s COBOL with Visual Basic related to the fact that each had it own separate and complex run-time system. Mixing two very proprietary run-time systems is a substantial undertaking. Most legacy run-time systems were architected and developed by their respective vendors long before PC’s, Windows and GUI’s were even invented.
Fujitsu Addresses the COBOL Need
Over the years Microsoft has recognized the need to support COBOL applications and has made multiple attempts to provide products to the COBOL community. Their original COBOL compiler was replaced by Micro Focus’ COBOL/2 product in 1988. The COBOL/2 product suffered from many of the aforementioned pitfalls, and Microsoft withdrew it from the market in June of 1993.
Fujitsu recognized this dilemma and set out to build a next generation COBOL development environment from the ground up. A special emphasis was placed upon the design of the run- time system to alleviate the above noted problems.
Additionally, Fujitsu developed a tool to aid in the conversion of COBOL/2 applications to NetCOBOL (while COBOL is a standard language, COBOL/2 contained a significant number of proprietary extensions).
