"It is really fast in handling simple file structures and doing operations to massive data sets. The company estimates that 220 billion lines of Cobol code are currently in production, on mainframes and other systems.Īlthough Cobol is widely regarded as a legacy language, Anderton argued it could be a viable choice for new projects for a number of reasons. A considerable amount of Cobol code still runs today. You can build composite applications that use the best language for each part of the job," he said.įor this release, Micro Focus has also extended basic Cobol with a number of additional C# and Java-like calls, with the idea that these constructs will make it easier for Java and C# programmers to use the language.Ĭreated in 1959, Cobol was designed to simplify the process of writing programs by using a syntax more easily understandable by non-programmers. The interoperability between the two is so much easier. This release, however, will allow developers to start working with the JVM in anticipation for R4. "The technology is there, but the usability is not 100 percent there," Anderton said. Micro Focus developed a Cobol compiler that can compile Cobol code into Java bytecode, making it runnable on any JVM platform. This JVM technical preview is a trial run for a full product-ready version in Visual Cobol R4, expected to be released in May. It is the first version of Visual Cobol to offer this capability, Anderton said.įor Linux and Unix users, Visual Cobol R3 now offers something called the Development Hub, which allows developers to write the Cobol code on the desktop and compile and debug the code on a remote machine. Version 3 also can be obtained as a plug-in for the Eclipse IDE (integrated development environment), in addition to Visual Studio.įor Azure-based applications, Visual Cobol takes advantage of Visual Studio 2010's innate capability to publish an application to an Azure cloud, the application hosting service offered by Microsoft and its partners.
The previous version of Visual Cobol was a plug-in to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, allowing Visual Studio users the ability to write programs in Cobol. Using Visual Cobol, a developer could write a Cobol application once and have it run unchanged on Unix or Linux, on a JVM, on an Azure-based hosted service or on the Microsoft.
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