CodeTurn Natural to COBOL

Astadia Natural to COBOL Migrations

Many of today’s mainframe applications that were developed in SAG Natural and Adabas are still mission critical and continue to deliver significant benefits to the organizations that use and rely upon them. Nevertheless, the Total Cost of Ownership and technological risk associated with these applications have now escalated to unsustainable levels. CodeTurn for Natural to COBOL migrations provides an opportunity to liberate these valuable and reliable business systems from their dependency upon non-strategic, legacy technologies and enable them to be integrated with state of the art components. Our CodeTurn supports COBOL, Java and C# as target languages.

Product Highlights

CodeTurn for Natural to COBOL migrations takes any application developed in Natural and automatically converts it into a fully identical application, designed to run within an alternative environment on the same platform, or a different platform altogether. The new application is completely free of dependencies on Natural technology and, instead, uses modern and industry standard development tools such as Java, .NET and COBOL to allow flexible application integration and extension.

Migrate from Anywhere

The Astadia migration process utilizes Natural’s SYSTRANS output format, in order to migrate the Natural artifacts. This approach largely isolates the conversion from the underlying system, therefore every Natural mainframe platform is supported: IBM mainframe (z/OS, z/VSE) and Fujitsu BS2000.

Migrate to Anywhere

A converted application can run on either Open Systems with Linux, Unix or Windows, in the Cloud, or on IBM Mainframe. The chosen target platform is simply selected as a configuration option during the conversion process.

When the target platform is LUW, additional Astadia tools handle the transformation of other source types, such as JCL, Assembler and COBOL programs, thus ensuring that the entire application runs on the new platform.

Client Technology Compatibility

End-users can connect to the application with either a web‑browser or their current Terminal Emulator.

The Terminal Emulator can optionally be retained for connection to the migration application, which enables the switch-over to be 100% transparent to end-users.

Many Natural mainframe applications are enhanced or integrated through third party screen-scraping technology. Astadia's Natural to COBOL conversions provide byte-to-byte compatibility with the existing mainframe protocols. Therefore, screen-scrapers remain compatible, even on Open Systems.

Natural Artifact Mappings and Maintenance

The table below summarizes how all the Natural object types are converted into their COBOL counterparts.

After migration, all COBOL code is maintained using standard development tools on the chosen platform. The converted Predefined maps can be maintained using our MapEdit WYSIWYG editor to further facilitate application integration and modernization.

Complete Natural Coverage

Natural is recognized as a rich and powerful development environment. The Astadia Natural to COBOL migration tools provide support for advanced Natural language features, including:

• High-precision Natural computations (29 digits)
• Natural Reinput statements
• Natural Escape handling
• Multi-lingual user interfaces
• Adabas, VSAM and DB2 data sources

Adabas Migration

The Adabas database and all its data are migrated automatically to a relational database (RDBMS).

• The migration tools support all of the leading RDBMS products
• All DDL is created fully automatic
• The data model can be normalized or de-normalized, or a hybrid
• The migration tools can map the Adabas Date and Time fields to native RDMBS Date and Time fields

Automated Testing

The converted application is tested with TestMatch and DataMatch. Using these tools significantly reduces the time and effort needed to complete the project:

• TestMatch avoids the requirement to manually create test scenarios for the complete application
• TestMatch limits the application end-user involvement in the project to acceptance testing
• DataMatch validates the content of databases, greatly reducing the effort needed to perform batch application testing

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Additional Resources

CodeTurn Natural to Java Fact Sheet

CodeTurn Natural to C# Fact Sheet

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Visit our Case Studies to see how we use automated migration and testing to help organizations accelerate digital transformation.

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