Veryant has refined its vCOBOL Enterprise tool with a view to increasing its adoption as a means of migration and compatibility with legacy mainframe and Micro Focus COBOL dialects.
Upping its debugging capabilities at the same time, Veryant says that vCOBOL Enterprise is a cost-effective alternative to legacy COBOL dialects commonly found running business-critical transaction processing systems.
"With an estimated 200 billion lines of COBOL still in use at enterprises worldwide, there is enormous need to preserve these large investments in data, yet evolve existing COBOL applications into more modern and useful resources at the same time," explained Dovid Lubin, vice president, Veryant.
To date, vCOBOL has proved useful when migrating COBOL applications off of IBM mainframes. The product has also been used to drive interactive and batch type applications on open systems. This new release tries to extend the value of companies' existing COBOL assets by decreasing annual software licensing expenses and enhancing interoperability with enterprise technologies such as XML.
"Developers using vCOBOL Enterprise are able to develop and deploy business-critical COBOL applications across UNIX, Linux, and Microsoft Windows based systems from a single source code base without the need for any platform-specific work," said Lubin. "This makes COBOL investments easily accessible to virtualized cloud and traditional client-server environments, and increases their value to enterprises."
In the latest vCOBOL release, Veryant has added:
- enhanced compatibility with legacy COBOL dialects (support for XML PARSE and GENERATE)
- support for common Micro Focus COBOL compatible library routines
- debugging improvements so users can trace paragraphs and programs as they execute
- mainframe compatible date, time, and delay callable services support, to provide current local time and date in several formats and conversion of dates and times
- the ability to make recursive calls, so a program can now directly or indirectly execute itself
These enhancements, along with continued integration with UniKix Mainframe Rehosting technology from Clerity, make vCOBOL an ideal, cost-effective alternative to legacy COBOL dialects on open systems.
