Common Business Oriented Language
COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) was
the first widely used high-level
programming language for business
applications. Many payroll, accounting, and
other business application
programs written in COBOL over the past 35 years are
still possible that
there are more existing lines of programming code in COBOL
than in any other
programming language has been update over the years. Today we
already stepped
in internet Age, most of old style business also have been
combined with
intent to create the e-business, so we suppose COBOL is not useful
anymore
but before we made a conclusion we’d better know how’s COBOL worked,
and
how’s COBOL will work in future then we could make decision. COBOL was
an
effort to make a programming language that was like natural English, easy
to
write and easier to read the coed after you’d written it, and COBOL is one
of
the oldest, and arguably the most successful and popular of all
programming
languages. The earliest version of the language, COBOL-60 and
-61, evolved to
the COBOL-85 standard sponsored by the Conference on Data
Systems Language (CODASYL).
COBOL has been declared dead so many times
since April 1968 till now, but COBOL
lives on. Nevertheless, the somber
pronouncements of COBOL’s demise continue,
and the pace has picked up with
such developments as clients-sever technology,
Visual Basic, Java, and
the chaos associated with the Year-2000 problems. Since
the year 2000 (Y2K)
problem is common in many business applications and most of
these are written
in COBOL, programmers with COBOL skills have become sought
after by major
corporations and contractors. A number of companies have updated
COBOL
and sell development tools to meet the requirements about COBOL
applications
using in e-business. Since the COBOL use for Oriented of business
it was
mostly serviced for big company. Even now many large companies have a
huge
pool of COBOL-based applications that constitute their core business
systems,
even in today’s e-business. (For instances, The Seagram Co. Ltd.,
The
Federal Express, and Canada Trust. Etc.) If COBOL declare to death
the
alternative is too awful to contemplate, the number of lines of
COBOL
application code ranges from 200 billion to 5 trillion. Rewriting
application in
Java may give purists a feeling of euphoria, but in
reality no one is doing
this, or if you feel really masochistic, you could
try and rewrite them in C++.
Every big company has to start from where it
is. This is means taking old,
arthritic applications and ‘wrapping’ them so
they become a stable starting
point for future developments. These
applications also need to be integrated,
and e-business means that these
systems need to be integrated and connected to
the outside world. As a matter
of fact, this is the most pressing issue facing
many large companies, forget
about Java and XML, many IT manger would be happy
if their applications could
talk to each other and provide an interface to the
outside world. Several
computer companies already developed some economical,
practical product could
combine with COBOL to working in e-business. At August
14,1995 Micro
Focus announced Visual Object COBOL™ version 1.0 for window®
95, in 1998
CASEGN system Ltd announces that COBOL for windows is
available
free-of-charge to promote the use of COBOL as a powerful
windows95/NT graphical
development tool, now IBM introduced VisualAge COBOL
2000 enterprise for OS/2
and Windows NT, and other COBOL supporters like
CORBRA, MERANT, etc. those
supporter’s software are enhanced following
features: a working station
development environment that enables you to
seamlessly develop, modify,
reengineer, maintain, modernize, and port host
applications right at your
desktop. As far as I am concerned, there is no
good reason not use one of the
contemporary versions of COBOL for developing
the server end of e-business
applications, and in reality many organizations
will. After all, Merant is
growing at around 40 percent a year, so quite a
few companies must be using its
products. As is usually the case in this
industry, someone will spend years
cobbling together a Java-based e0business,
applying copious amounts of tape and
string, and by the skin of their teeth
get something that performs a useful
business function; and we will all
marvel at it. The fact that it could have
been written in COBOL in a tenth of
the time will be totally overlooked: after
all, wee must celebrate how
rapidly we are advancing in this industry. We might
not buy so much
otherwise. So it’s not surprising that they would have a
favorable. After I
do this research the following statement is a useful advice
indeed. What the
legacy argument does not address is the substantial amount of
new code being
written today in small organizations – organizations that never
have had, and
never will have, a mainframe. Many of these organizations will
work hard to
avoid writing any of the applications that COBOL has been used for,
because
it’s much more economical to buy a package to do the job. But if a
fledgling
10-person company with one programmer (or a modest 100-person company
with
5-10 programmers) does decide to write an application system today for
its
PC-based. Internet-aware environment, my guess is that the odds of
COBOL being
used are about one in a thousand. So if you are a large company
and you want to
move forward from where you are without taking huge risks,
COBOL is worth at
least a
look.