Why COBOL?
MANASYS Jazz is a programming system that generates COBOL. COBOL is an old language, most of our colleges have stopped teaching it, and most new programmers are ignorant of it and, if they’ve heard of it at all, view it as overdue for replacement. Surely it’s the wrong choice for MANASYS Jazz, which is a modern programming system?
From its introduction (about 1960) to the decline of the mainframe era (sometime about 1980) COBOL was the world’s most popular programming language, and it still dominates the world of enterprise computing. There is now a huge legacy of COBOL systems that touch us all whenever we buy anything on line and pay our bills: in 2020 some 220 million lines of COBOL continued to ruin major transactional systems, primarily in financial institutions and government agencies. Even now, to respond to changing requirements new COBOL is still being written and new COBOL programmers must be trained. Articles like this paint mainframe COBOL systems as a critical risk, but COBOL provides a stable, reliable technology to keep these mission-critical systems running. Actually New Jersey’s problems weren’t caused by the back-end mainframe COBOL systems, they continued to provide millisecond response. The problems were in the newer-technology Web front-ends. Large-system users are right to cling to their COBOL systems. For the foreseeable future there will be an ongoing need for COBOL developers.
COBOL skills are hard to find, and modern programmers want to work with attractive tools, not 3270 emulators. And understanding a legacy system of many thousand lines of code is difficult, whatever language it’s written in, especially when it was written by programmers who retired years ago and aren’t available to consult. The world of COBOL needs help. MANASYS Jazz provides it.
To understand a legacy system, first you must understand its data structure. With Import-from-COBOL, SQL, and Easytrieve you can quickly create equivalent Jazz-format data definitions. But COBOL and other definitions omit a lot of information – display formats, validation rules, data relationships, file locations – leaving this to procedural code and other objects. This can be easily added to the Jazz definitions: now you have an easily-read description that gives you all the information you’ll need in one place, not spread out in multiple objects as it is in COBOL and other languages. This is a great way for new developers to record the knowledge of their senior colleagues.
From these definitions many programs can be created with easy dialogs. When the dialog alone is insufficient, logic can be added with the simple Jazz language. Then click [Process] and it is instantly turned into COBOL that will compile and run first time. Some of your developers won’t need to learn COBOL, others will find this a great starting point as they become COBOL specialists. What COBOL skills shortage?
Your legacy system has now become even more valuable because with MANASYS Jazz you can quickly add web services that make its data available to client apps, preserving its data management function while you develop new front-end services. And with MANASYS providing a concise definition of its data structure, and of the new functions that you have added, the next generation of developers will find the legacy much easier to understand than before, or if it is rewritten in languages (Java, C#) that are only slightly more concise than COBOL.
For all these reasons, COBOL (and JCL, JSON, and C#) are excellent
choices for MANASYS Jazz.
Conclusion
This is the 8th of a 10-part
series of articles about MANASYS Jazz. Click below to see previous articles
1.
What is MANASYS Jazz?
2. How does MANASYS Work?
3. Convert Easytrieve to COBOL with MANASYS Jazz
4. Mainframe Modernization Issues
5. Web
Services: Key to Mainframe Modernization
6. Web
Service Clients: 2 clicks generates client-side
interfaces for your web services
See our web page if you want more information about MANASYS Jazz and to see what else it can do. Contact us if you have any questions, or connect with us on LinkedIn. Download a free evaluation copy to try out MANASYS Jazz yourself.