Hi, I’m Giovanni, development manager at Anubex, and I'm going to answer the question: what about cold programmers when I transition from COBOL to Java. To be clear, I'm talking about Java specifically here, but everything I say will apply equally when targeting c-sharp. So the short answer is your development team can transition together with your code base from COBOL to Java. While learning Java, but keeping their core strength which is insight in your application's business process applications code base. In general, it's a lot easier to pick up a new language that is to learn all those ins and outs of a decades-old code base. Next to this general learning principle our COBOL to Java solution exhibits some key characteristics, which make it actually easy for a global developer to recognize this code once it's transitioned to Java.
The first characteristic is that of your overall structure of the code base. In the COBOL world, you will have programs and separate teams, and also in the Java world, you will have the same programs and subroutines of course encoded in Java classes. The second characteristic plays at the level of source files. In COBOL, you will have source files with those programs and subroutines and you will have copy books. Also after transformation, you will see the same source files in Java. Also, copy books to be clear will become separate entities. Third characteristic is that of the internal structure of global programs. These are typically divided in a data division and a procedure division, and within your procedure division you have paragraphs and sections with a specific order which is important in COBOL. Now also after transformation to Java, you will see methods in the Java class which have the same textual representation, the same textual order as they were in COBOL. The fourth characteristic relates to comments and names inside cover programs. Each comment in COBOL is preserved in Java, and it's placed in the same places as it was in COBOL, for example if it was just placed before a data definition, you will find it just in front of the same data definition in Java.
Also, all names of programs of files of variables of procedures, sections, and paragraphs, all these names are preserved. Of course, there will be CamelCase to make them fit in with the Java world, but they will still be there. Which brings us to the fifth and last of the special characteristics, and that's how individual statements are being treated. Because COBOL is a very complex language with very specific behavior of statements, we have to implement them in terms of support liibrary calls. What that means is that most COBOL statements like display or unstring or go to will be transformed into a COBOL.co2 or COBOL.display or COBOL.unstring method invocation, where the method specifically is provided by our support library. For the COBOL developer, it really means that you will feel immediately familiar with the code base, not just at the structure level but even understanding the code itself without having to learn Java.
So what does it take for a global programmer to not only feel familiar and recognize this code to actually be able to maintain it and to extend in the future? Really just two things, of course a basic training course in Java is required. Next to that we also need a one day training session in which we explain how this transformation was executed, and what the support Library provides as an API. Past experience shows that it's really enough to bring most COBOL programmers to a level where they're as productive in the new code base as they were in the previous code base. Some programmers will even go beyond to become general purpose Java developers, and yours, it will just become very good application developers as they currently are. At the same time a company has a golden opportunity here to build a mixed team. Within the one hand, COBOL developers which are deep in sight in the application itself, or you have Java developers who have knowledge of modern practices and Java itself of course. Thank you for watching, if you want more information please go to anubex.com and download our white papers where you can also find many code examples.
