Cobol To The Web

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September 22, 1997

Cobol To The Web

Products from Micro Focus and Fujitsu seek to bridge gap
By Gregory Dalton
wo new products are intended to bridge the gulf between the emerging business applications on the Web and the mountains of Cobol code residing on mainframes. NetExpress from Micro Focus approaches the problem from the Cobol side, while the NetCobol compiler from Fujitsu Software Corp. approaches it from the Web side.
NetExpress, announced last week, places Cobol code in a "wrapper" that makes it directly accessible to a Web server. This makes the Web suddenly available to the legions of Cobol developers who are not familiar with HTML or Java.
That's good news for the Army an d Air Force Exchange Services in Dallas, which says it sells about $5 billion in retail goods to American military personnel around the world. The organization wanted to give its 15,000 vendors access to its invoicing system, but its developers were not trained in Java or HTML. "We looked at each other and said, 'What's the Web?'" says section chief Clyde Todd, a Cobol programmer.
Todd says his team avoided wrestling with unfamiliar programming languages by using NetExpress to write a Cobol interface that pulls data from a SQL database and publishes invoices in HTML on an extranet accessible to the vendors.
Such programs will be "real useful" for expanding access to Cobol programs, but they don't solve related questions of security, says Jim Duggan, a research director at Gartner Group Inc. in Stamford, Conn. He says other products have provided front ends for accessing Cobol code, but NetExpress and Fujitsu's NetCobol are the first to get into the language to get at information.
NetCobol is aimed at Java programmers who are not experienced with Cobol. The compiler converts Cobol into 100% Pure Java bytecode, and provides developers access to legacy data with a set of tools for building client applets or server applications.
The combination of Java, a fledgling language, and Cobol, the established mainstay of corporate America, is an "odd mix," says Duggan. Fujitsu is "getting pretty far out there on the curve. We think it's a bit early for 100% Pure Java. I would be skeptical of the performance."
Harry Fenik, an analyst at Zona Research in Redwood City, Calif., is intrigued by the idea of a Cobol-to-Java compiler. But he adds that "most cross-compilers have difficulties." Since Cobol is written and compiled for specific machines, he wonders what would happen to that Cobol code during a conversion: "How much of it is left [for administrators] to deal with?"
One systems integrator who has tested NetCobol is keen on it. Says Jay Johnson, president of Advanced Logics Inc. in Clearwater, Fl a., "We are able to bring business to the Web in a way that we weren't able to do before."

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