COBOL History

"COBOL is a third-generation programming language, and one of the oldest programming languages still in active use. Its name is an acronym for COmmon Business-Oriented Language, defining its primary domain in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments.

COBOL was initially created in 1959 by The Short Range Committee, one of three committees proposed at a meeting held at the Pentagon on May 28 and 29, 1959, organized by Charles Phillips of the United States Department of Defense (exactly one year after the Zurich ALGOL 58 meeting). The Short Range Committee was formed to recommend a short range approach to a common business language. It was made up of members representing six computer manufacturers and three government agencies. In particular, the six computer manufacturers were Burroughs Corporation, IBM, Minneapolis-Honeywell (Honeywell Labs), RCA, Sperry Rand, and Sylvania Electric Products. The three government agencies were the US Air Force, the David Taylor Model Basin, and the National Bureau of Standards (Now NIST). This committee was chaired by a member of the NBS. An Intermediate-Range Committee and a Long-Range Committee were proposed at the Pentagon meeting as well. However although the Intermediate Range Committee was formed, it was never operational; and the Long-Range Committee was never even formed. In the end a sub-committee of the Short Range Committee developed the specifications of the COBOL language."

COBOL Migration

Since many business enterprises can no longer afford expensive enterprise development environments, COBOL application's expensive programmers, maintenance and support costs are causing it to be phased out. Most companies are looking to replace parts or all of the COBOL based applications with Java and J2EE. In some cases, modernization of the COBOL applications involves capturing the business logic and migrating or refactoring the code to a three tier model. This migration is an attractive, low-cost alternative. RPC middleware is often used in conjunction with Service Oriented Architectures to enable the modernized COBOL applications to consume or provide web services. This modernization process and integration with SOA avoids the costly maintenance and support of the COBOL programs. 

For COBOL modernization, eCube Systems provides an Evolutionary approach to integrating the existing COBOL enterprise software with Web Services and XML. eCube calls this approach Enterprise Evolution - an intelligent systematic and phased solution that makes COBOL software evolution the extension of technology equity. This COBOL migration process is based on the evolution of existing enterprise business logic and the integration/implementation of contemporary platforms, such as .NET, J2EE, Web Services, HTTP/Servlets and XML.

Enterprise Evolution employs a phased approach called ARM (Assessment, Remediation and Modernization) so that the users can continue to use the existing enterprise software solution while phasing in components of the migrated system. As part of the assessment phase, Enterprise Evolution re factors the legacy software to defend it from “software hardening” the growing inflexibility of legacy systems and enabling it to participate as an enterprise service provider.

COBOL Migration has a cost, but it shouldn’t be performance. In many cases IT organization are finding that developing enterprise solutions that are used to integrate legacy systems together have created a bottleneck that severely impacts performance. A true COBOL migration or modernization strategy embraces a commitment to steady improvement in performance and the fulfillment of service level goals.

Correspondingly, risk is the something every business executive has to deal with. Whether a company decides to “stay put”, replace their existing COBOL systems with COTS, or modernize, there is risk involved. eCube is committed to balancing the risk, with proven technology, proven enterprise solutions and COBOL modernization methods that insure the value of IT efforts moving into the future. Enterprise Software modernization means that successful COBOL applications can be transformed, migrated, maintained, renewed, evolved, or harvested to speed new development in such a way as to assure the ability of every enterprise software solution to meet its commitments to the business and exceed expectation to reliability.