News

COBOL Eclipsed

• By Joab Jackson
• January 4, 2009

With the latest release of its development and deployment platform for the Common Business-Oriented Language(COBOL), Veryant will unveil a COBOL editor plug-in for the Eclipse Integrated Developer Environment.

Veryant's isCOBOL Application Platform Suite provides both a development environment to edit COBOL code, as well as a Java-based runtime platform that could run the code on modern commodity servers.

The soon-to-be-released isCOBOL APS Service Pack 1 will include a plug-in for editing COBOL code on the Eclipse IDE. This plug-in could eliminate the need for a separate COBOL IDE by allowing developers to work on COBOL code within the same program they may use to edit code written in Java or other Eclipse-supported programming languages.

"COBOL continues to be the language of business around the world," said Veryant executive Alfredo Iglesias in a statement. "By including an Eclipse-based IDE and other advances in our latest release, it is now even easier to maintain and modernize COBOL application code."

The service pack will also provide a way for developers to compile COBOL programs that can run on the UniKix mainframe rehosting software from Clerity. Code originally developed for IBM Customer Information Control System (CICS) and Information Management System (ISM) mainframe systems can be run on commodity servers through the use of UniKix.

Other improvements in the service pack include refactored code, additional diagnostics tools and support for the External File Handler (EXTFH), which helps COBOL programs ingest indexed, relative or sequential files.