New power for COBOL developers.

[Anuj Dhawan]

This is bit old, however worth sharing:

[center]Announcing Enterprise COBOL for z/OS V5.1[/center]

COBOL is one of the oldest programming languages in existence but it is still running the world’s most critical business applications. Everytime you withdraw cash from the ATM machine, deposit a check, book an airplane ticket, or make an insurance claim, a COBOL application is likely to be processing your transaction.

Our new announcement for Enterprise COBOL for z/OS affirms IBM’s strong commitment to delivering innovation and value to COBOL customers on System z. Enterprise COBOL V5.1 is where tradition meets innovation. It is re-architected to include advanced technology for optimizing COBOL applications to fully exploit z/Architecture. With modern advanced optimization and improved exploitation of z hardware, many well-structured, CPU-intensive batch applications have shown performance increases greater than 10%. This will enable customers to shorten the processing time of their business critical applications and reduce operating cost. This new technology framework also lays solid groundwork for delivering release-to-release performance improvement roadmap for COBOL on System z.

Enterprise COBOL V5.1 maintains source and binary compatibility with older COBOL releases on System z. Most correct COBOL programs will compile and execute without changes and produce the same results. You can mix “old” and “new” COBOL code within a single application and communicate with static or dynamic calls. Supports of some very old language features and compile options have been removed in this release.

Enterprise COBOL v5.1 supports new level of z/OS System Management Facilities (SMF) tracking. This allows users implementing sub-capacity tracking to reduce their administrative overhead.

Modernization enables the reuse of proven business logic. Users can deliver new enhancements quicker and with less cost and lower risk. Enterprise COBOL v5.1 offers new and enhanced features to enable users to add modern graphical user interfaces to business critical COBOL applications, work with latest CICS, IMS or DB2 middleware, or extend them to work with web, cloud, or mobile infrastructures. Some new features include Java 7 support, unbounded tables and groups, and provide COBOL applications better control in generation of XML documents.

Enterprise COBOL v5.1 also has new features to improve programmer productivity. The total size of all data items in Working-storage or Local-storage section is raised to 2GB (from 128MB). The maximum size of an individual data item is raised to 999,999,999 bytes (From 128MB). New built-in functions are added to improve programmability of UTF-8 applications, and improve capability for processing UTF-8 data in DB2 and XML documents.

Enterprise COBOL v5.1 supports the ecosystem of COBOL development tools supplied by IBM and ISVs.

Courtsey: developerworks