Do you want to reinvigorate your COBOL development environment for Unix? How about bringing your COBOL business logic into the Java ecosystem? In this session we will investigate two major features of the Visual COBOL product line. You will see how the power of the Eclipse IDE can be used to develop your COBOL applications on remote Unix machines. You will also see how Java technologies can breathe new life into your COBOL code.

1. Visual COBOL Development for
Unix & Java
Darren Self & Paula Willis
Product Development

2. Visual COBOL for Eclipse
• Complete COBOL development environment
– Modern IDE
– Remote development
– Native and managed code
2

3. Why work remotely?
3

4. RSE/SAMBA
• Project Creation/Maintenance
• Compilation
• Debugging
4

5. Why hold with tradition?
© Daily Telegraph
5

6. From this...
6

7. To this...
7

8. Develop on all platforms
Well, almost!
© Science Museum, London

9. Remote Development Supported Platforms
Desktop Eclipse IDE Server Hubs
9

10. Seeing more details...
10 © Darren Self, 2012

11. 11

12. Java
JVM
source code managed code
java (.java) JVM bytecode
Java ...
class c1 compiler iconst_0i
aload
{
javac istore_1
} jsr
.class/.jar
Write Once Run Anywhere

13. COBOL
JVM
source code managed code
COBOL (.cbl) JVM bytecode
Program-id P COBOL ...
working-stor compiler iconst_0i
procedure di aload
display “hel jvmgen istore_1
goback. jsr
.class/.jar

14. Mixing languages
source code managed code JVM
COBOL
compiler
COBOL
Java
compiler ...
Java JVM
bytecode
JRuby
compiler
JRuby

15. What is JVM COBOL?
• COBOL with extensions to take advantage of features of
the JVM framework
set/invoke set/invoke
OO syntax OO syntax
inner-class inner-class
annotations annotations
exception handling
exception handling
collections collections
declare declare Core COBOL
extension methods
extension methods
sync verb sync verb
predefined types predefined types
linkage-less linkage-less
enums enums
and much more....
and much more....

16. Choice of 2 runtime configurations
Pure runtime Impure runtime
native native native
app app app
app app
myapp.jar/class myapp.jar/class
runtime components
Micro Focus
FileHandler SQL Native
Native SQL
mffilehandler.jar mfsqljvm.jar FileHandler
pure runtime runtime
mfcobolrtspure.jar mfcobolrts.jar & mfcobol.jar
• Pure JVM runtime, JVM FileHandler, JVM SQL • JVM runtime with native interop support
• No support for interop to native code • Calls the native FileHandler

17. SmartLinkage
• If legacy COBOL app contains COBOL data types in linkage
• Set ilsmartlinkage directive on legacy COBOL app
• On compilation auto-generates managed types
• So you can access COBOL linkage data from other managed
languages transparently.
– No hand-written wrapper classes needed
– No changes required to the original code
– COBOL data shown in C#/Java/COBOL intellisense

18. Darren.Self@microfocus.com
Paula.Willis@microfocus.com