The new COBOL

The World Of COBOL

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COBOL is dead, Long live COBOL!!! COBOL has been pronounced dead and buried more often than enough, yet like Kings of a powerful and long lasting dynasty, COBOL comes back younger and more powerful than ever before. After COBOL birth year (1959), we had COBOL-68, COBOL-74, COBOL-85, and now believe it or not: OO COBOL...and no, it does not represent zero-zero but Object Oriented COBOL!

Now the King of computer languages returns. Awesome and Powerful.

OO COBOL as its predecessors [for decades], has been designed for the support of the most up to date business rules and requirements, information systems and advanced computing technology (IT). Just as important OO COBOL will STILL run existing COBOL applications written during the last four decades!!! It helps you take advantage of your extensive in-house COBOL and business rules expertise and wealth of existing programming resources and COBOL applications in which you have invested so much to stay ahead of the competition during all these years. OO COBOL is the most viable solution to help meet and resolve today's business challenges. It works as it has in the past with your data and your business needs. As in the past the inner power and strength of COBOL is its ability to interface and work in conjunction and harmony with other tools - such as CICS, IMS, DB2, ASSEMBLER ADABAS, ORACLE, GDDM, and now even Windows GUI, ActiveX and the Internet!!! OO COBOL brings you something new in addition. Seamlessly and transparently integrates your COBOL programs with Microsoft Visual Basic, Visual C++, Visual J++, Visual InterDev and many other tools such as Crystal Reports, Data Junction, Oracle, MS-Access, ODBC data access support, Excel etc. OO COBOL let you use existing third-party ActiveX or even create and export COBOL ActiveX controls that fit your COBOL applications into Microsoft's component architecture! How about running your COBOL applications on the Web? You can even do it with your existing COBOL applications! And COBOL will always remain the fastest and most efficient machine code generator for business applications, the fastest and most comprehensive data manipulator from simple sequential files to indexed files to relational database tables. No other programming language in the history of business computer applications can match its powerful and versatile data handling capabilities under so many methods of data storage. The proof? Discover how many HDBMS and RDBMS vendors are supporting COBOL from Mainframe to minis to personal computers: DB2, IMS, ADABAS, Oracle, Informix, Sybase, TOTAL, Dbase, etc. etc. etc. All that and more on MVS, VM, VAX, AS/400, OS/2, ICL, UNIX (times 100+), Windows and all other past and existing computer Operating Systems.

Some of the unnumbered features of the New COBOL

Maybe you got all you can out of your former or current COBOL environment and have decided to try some of those "hot" PC languages you read about in popular computer magazines. Maybe you have spent fortunes on rewriting your COBOL applications using VB, C++, DELPHI or other flashy PC languages, costing you probably three times the budget you have planned and taking you three times longer to complete and still not giving you the performance you were wishing for. Maybe you are even thinking about rewriting again(!!) the applications using J++ or some other "Language Du Jour++". The ++ really has always meant only one thing: Gi'me mo' money!!! Well, before you waste one more time your energy and money, think about what the new OO COBOL can do for you: You will be in for a very pleasant surprise. Finally. COBOL Compiler The closest OO support to Smalltalk (known as the purest Object Oriented language) CORBA standards Support COBOL standards for COBOL-68, COBOL-74, COBOL-85, OO COBOL, X/OPEN COBOL Very compact and efficient executables (30 to 60% smaller than the ones generated by VB) Standard object format generation The fastest most reliable compiler in its class Higher quality and performance result in professional business software design Runtime System Create .EXE or .DLL as you wish automatically. Not .DEF or .LNK files to maintain manually. One of the fastest program execution runtime ever CGI Web support using 100% pure COBOL Seamless integration with Visual Basic Royalty-free runtime distribution Built-in ODBC support for popular tools such as Oracle, MS-Access and other popular software Integrated Development Environment Full interactive debugging of COBOL and Visual Basic (using VB debugger at the same time) Source Control Management for team application development support Full WYSIWYG GUI programming capabilities and 100% pure procedural and/or Object Oriented COBOL using controls drag-n-drop design similar to VB and tenfold more stable (no VB or C++, etc. needed here) Visual graphical reports design tool using 100% COBOL (similar to Crystal Reports) Use and create/export Active X controls Guided development through context-sensitive menus Additional Tools supported Coding Email and remote connectivity directly inside your COBOL program calling Windows Dial-up Networking facility Ad-hoc report generation (using Crystal Reports Professional) Powerful callable standalone sort utility Dialects Conversion from other popular COBOL compilers Believing in the future of OO COBOL more mission-critical business applications, software development tools, databases engines, ODBC drivers, and networking tools are produced for the Distributed Computing Environment [Client/Server] by dozens of popular software vendors including ILS International, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, HP, Sybase and many more.

Do it right. Get help from the COBOL Masters

Our International COBOL Master Consultants are here to help you achieve what you were not able to complete on-time and on-budget using fragile or unstable development tools for your day-in day-out mission-critical business applications. We can guarantee much higher success for your business software development projects by showing you what the new COBOL can do for you training your COBOL resources to use the advanced and sophisticated tools that even VB or C++ "gurus" would envy helping you take advantage of the resources who know your business rules and operating environment helping you reuse your existing COBOL applications in which you have invested so much to stay ahead of the competition during all these years. The same COBOL applications you have fine-tuned for years giving you satisfaction and full control can now be converted with minimum effort to use Windows 95/98/NT & 2000 (also 64-bit Windows when ready) client/server and/or Internet technologies helping you reduce turn over of "unhappy" COBOL programmers seeking technological evolution elsewhere. This is known by every project manager to be a major cause for projects failing deadlines and budget limits bringing back pride and recognition to your COBOL programmers sometimes referred to as "dinosaurs" and rewarding them for their loyalty to your business growth by providing them with state-of-the art programming tools helping you complete quickly a small pilot project of a rock-solid proof of concept to help you plan and balance with more confidence the time and money of your future client/server development projects and last but not least, making a possible 10 to 50% saving on client/server development cost over a C++ or VB project.

The proof of the existence of a World Class Windows programming language

The following is an excerpt of a sophisticated Freight Revenue Accounting and Tracking software for the international community. Please note the following important points: Developed by COBOL programmers who had no prior experience with GUI design tools and who know absolutely nothing about Windows obscure APIs and its cryptic internal calls. They do not need to in order to accomplish a world class assignment. A mere 2 weeks of training were necessary for experienced COBOL programmers. They did not need to learn about the business rules, they are all in-house valuable resources and no hiring of external help was needed. The project is on time and on budget and producing outstanding highly professional results. The entire application (estimated at 1.95 million lines of code) is being developed [as its previous versions] in one single version and can be used in any country around our beautiful planet Earth, no matter what the native tongue is and whether they write left to right or right-to-left! The original version of this software was running in MS-DOS character mode version 5.0 and above and was developed in COBOL in 1987-1990 but supported only(!) Latin characters based languages - English, French, Russian, Spanish etc…and Arabic, Greek and Hebrew. This shows how powerful even then COBOL was. The new version is all pure COBOL/OO COBOL.     - No VB     - No C     - No C++     - No third-party ActiveX controls     - No other flavor or preservative from other computer language or GUI generator tool. It is the same module that runs for all the international languages - meaning that there is not a module for each different language: ONE runs ALL, that's the power and grace of COBOL. Even for languages that are written in the opposite direction to Latin: for example Arabic and Hebrew, it is still the same module. We use an efficiently sophisticated method of flipping every Windows' control as if you looked at it in a mirror. ALL is done using COBOL logic!!! The generated compact .EXE and .DLL files are from thirty (30) to sixty-five (65) percent smaller than similar modules we have written in VB before resulting in a slow runtime performance in both loading of executable modules and data access speed in indexed files and RDBMS tables. COBOL executables load and run much faster. We can switch to any language anytime at runtime at the click of the mouse button. No need to close the application and start it again. Please refer to the bitmap on Figure 2. Even more amazing we can have five (5) international languages simultaneously active in the same application: Please refer to the bitmap on Figure 13. ALL International languages supported by Windows 95/98 and NT are accessible by COBOL. Unfortunately, we are not able to demonstrate in this document how the twenty (20) or so various sounds played by this application sound like, nor the video clips about ILS International, nor how the fourteen (14) different shapes of cursor pointers look like when the user points at various parts of a given window or dialog box all this gracefully and easily written entirely in the new OO COBOL. Some of the International languages shown here such as Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Russian are not using meaningful words but rather strings of their related characters. This is to demonstrate the 100% capability of OO COBOL to support that specific language in a variety of character shapes and sizes (fonts).

Regarding the content of this document

If you have questions, comments, suggestions or inquiries regarding the entire content of this page, please use Email to send a note to Master Dinosaur and Senior International Consultant (26++ years of COBOL consulting at all levels of the corporate world in 27 countries on 5 continents - over 70 companies and Federal/State Agencies in more than 50 cities in the USA alone and over 1.5 million frequent flyer miles using over 25 airlines, 2 of them have greatly benefited from his technical experience and vision for several years). This page can now be downloaded in zipped MS-Word format document.  However due to the rich graphic contents of the document, it may take a a few minutes based on your connection speed. Read also our white paper "COBOL on the Internet" on Web application development using only the COBOL language and HTML.

Availability Of ALL International languages supported by Windows 95/98/NT

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Using the English language

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Using the Arabic language

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Using the French language

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Using the German language

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Using the Greek language

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Using the Hebrew language

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Using the Italian language

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Using the Portuguese language

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Using the Russian language

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Using the Spanish language

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Using five (5) International languages simultaneously: Prompts, title & text in Spanish. Help in English. Error & Info messages in French. Push-buttons in Arabic. Data entry in Russian. Wow!

Figure 13