MANASYS Jazz Creates Great COBOL!

MANASYS Jazz is a programming system that generates COBOL. 

COBOL generators have a bad reputation.  Often deserved!  Many produce obscure and inefficient programs, perhaps invoking proprietary run-time support routines, and there is no practical way of understanding and changing the COBOL if you need to.  The advantages of generating COBOL instead of object code are lost.

But at Jazz Software we take great pride in the quality of our COBOL.

Firstly, everything is open and visible.  Even the source code of support routines for functions like data trimming or Date arithmetic is supplied, so there are no secrets.  There is no proprietary run-time code that could cause problems.  Programs communicate with the host system (z/OS mainframe, Micro Focus Enterprise Server, etc) through standard COBOL and JCL, web service programs communicate with WSDL (SOAP) or JSON (REST).  They use standard I/O statements (READ, EXEC CICS READ, EXEC SQL SELECT etc).  We aim to simplify your IT environment, not add yet another layer of complexity.

Secondly, we’ve taken care to ensure that the COBOL is clear and readable. 

· The complete Jazz program is printed as comments at the top of the program, giving you guaranteed documentation of what this program does.

· Your field names are used (prefix “JZ-” is added to COBOL reserved words).   Jazz re-uses the names in different records, and always generates qualified names.

· Comments repeat the Jazz statement and describe the functions of the generated logic.

· The code is clear, with consistent indentation.

WSPGEM is an example.  This is a web service provider program that will update a DB2 table, using a record digest (checksum) to maintain database integrity in a high performance system where you can’t lock the database while you wait for the response, but you have to prevent updates if another user has changed the record in the meantime. Have a look at this video (example starts 1 min into the video) to see how easy it is to write a program like this

Thirdly, the COBOL is efficient.  MANASYS programs have essentially no overhead: we challenge anyone to produce a more efficient program, in any programming language!  Unless you think omitting input message validation will make your programs more efficient!  

We aim to provide the kind of program that your best programmers would write, if only they had the time to do it properly!