Derek Britton sur Twitter : "Steady as it goes - #COBOL remains a #top25 language on #COBOLrocks #appdev #programming. INQUIRER reveals winners of Tech Hero Awards- The Inquirer. The INQUIRER has revealed the winners of its first Tech Hero Awards, which celebrated the best business IT products, companies and people across the industry. The winners were announced at the Tech Hero Awards ceremony at Ruby Blue, London on Tuesday 19 May. The awards covered software and hardware products, along with innovation, events and people working in IT departments and at technology vendors. The winners were decided by INQUIRER readers, who voted in their thousands, choosing from a shortlist put together by The INQUIRER team of tech experts. Headline sponsor Category sponsor Here are The INQUIRER Tech Hero Awards winners.
Congratulations to all the winners! Best Smartphone Sony Xperia Z3 Best Tablet Microsoft Surface Pro 3 Best Laptop/HybridAsus Transformer Book T200 Best Business Mobile App BigHand Go Best Developer Tool Micro Focus Visual COBOL Best Business Software SoftMaker Office HD Best Storage SanDisk Optimus MAX Best Data Centre StorageDell SC4020 Best Processor Intel Core M.
Ed Airey sur Twitter : "#COBOL on the rise! See the latest #programming #language rankings on #TIOBE - #COBOL now #16 and breaking Top 20. Podcasts and Downloads - Peter Day's World of Business. Grace Hopper: An IT pioneer. For every hot new technology that comes along, so does the perception that government agencies will face a shortage of individuals with the right skills to support that technology. For years, concerns swirled around the need for more workers skilled in cloud and mobile technologies. This was followed by big data, and the belief that agencies would not be able to fully leverage exploding data volume without first growing the ranks of in-house data scientists. More recently, it is the dearth of cyber security IT professionals that agencies have set their sights on. 2014 marks the 50th anniversary of the mainframe computer, and many years on from the mainframe's predicted demise, nearly every single federal government agency still depends heavily on "big iron" to run core operations.
COBOL is equally critical to government agency efforts to modernize their so-called legacy IT systems and core databases that occupy approximately 70 percent of the federal government's $82 billion IT budget. Alexander J Turner sur Twitter : "@moru0011 shocking isn't it! #Java is rapidly loosing relevance in the modern world. I'd hate to it 'do a #COBOL' :( Top 10 Reasons to Learn COBOL | Micro Focus Blog. Posted on 05. Feb, 2013 by Scot Nielsen in COBOL, Corporate Social Responsibility, News, Skills A legendary language What is the first thing which springs to mind when you think of COBOL?
Did you know that 200 times more transactions are processed daily by COBOL business applications than there are Google and You Tube searches made? COBOL is not about to drop dead – it still dominates the business language world. 1. Learning COBOL isn’t like learning a completely new language: it’s English! To demonstrate how straightforward it is, here is an example of the “Hello world” program in COBOL: Yes, that really is all you need to write to run this program. 2. COBOL has been ported to virtually every hardware platform. 3. Businesses already using COBOL are likely to continue to use COBOL rather than replace it. 4. It is no surprise that the financial sector is underpinned by COBOL systems: banking, insurance, fund management, pension systems, payroll and credit cards, all depend on COBOL. 5. 6.
Eclipse Visual COBOL Page. What Is Eclipse - Visual COBOL? Eclipse is a major open-source integrated development environment offering a similar level of functionality to Visual Studio (from Microsoft) whilst being largely platform independent due to being written in Java. For more about the amazing Eclipse IDE - see its home page. Micro Focus has created a COBOL plugin for Eclipse. This has been provided as an addition to the Server Express product. In the near future, this will also be joining the Visual COBOL family of COBOL development products (see Visual Studio - Visual COBOL).
Remote Development Option A huge amount of the world is run from Unix and Linux servers whilst the majority of desktop computers still run Microsoft Windows. Using Eclipse - Visual COBOL with the remote development option, programmers can now remotely develop, debug and test COBOL applications in a powerful Eclipse IDE. Tutorial Videos Pro-COBOL And SQL Development Debugging With Eclipse - Visual COBOL Installing RDO Getting Started With RDO. The Future Of IDEs Is Here. Today I saw the future of all IDE based development; this is odd because it mainly a COBOL IDE.
If you are interested in COBOL or not - you must read on. Imagine: You have your new computer freshly installed from IT. But, you are a developer. So, the next 48 hours of your working life will be completely consumed setting up development environment. You have to download your IDE. You have to install all the right plugins. Welcome to a world of pain.
Today I set up a full Eclipse based COBOL environment, created a program and ran it with almost no effort and taking maybe 15 minutes of effort - from scratch. Frankly - I was gobsmacked how easy Elastic COBOL is. Is the COBOL any good? The point is, this just works out of the cloud, no installation, no overhead, no effort. Above is the first page for starting off a project. It took about the time to make a cup of tea for the instance to become available. Next I simply clicked on 'Click To Connect Now'. Definitely the future. Maybe A Lower Barrier Route To Legacy Apps In The Cloud? At Micro Focus I did some research in to using Shell In A Box to access legacy console applications from the web. We were looking into how to modernize legacy console applications to run in the cloud. We figured that the barrier was too great to force a program vendor to completely replace the UI before trying out cloud computing.
Further, for some back office applications, whilst console based UIs are clunky, they work and so there is little commercial benefit in replacing them. It took only a few hours to get a COBOL console application running on Redhat Linux to be available from a web browser. Indeed, we had a fairly complex menu based application running in safari on the iPhone by the end of the day! A little further research indicated that it would be possible to enhance the way Shell In A Box worked to start to make the UI more pleasing by intercepting 'clues' from the information coming from the console to the browser and add extra GUI features based on them.
HTML5 Remote Desktop | Web VNC | AJAX VNC. NoVNC. Shellinabox - Web based AJAX terminal emulator. Overview Shell In A Box implements a web server that can export arbitrary command line tools to a web based terminal emulator. This emulator is accessible to any JavaScript and CSS enabled web browser and does not require any additional browser plugins. Most typically, login shells would be exported this way: shellinaboxd -s /:LOGIN This command starts a web server at that allows users to login with their username and password and to get access to their login shell. All client-server communications are encrypted, if SSL/TLS certificates have been installed. More details are available in the manual page. Demo As a demonstration of the terminal emulator's capabilities, we have connected it to a minimal BASIC interpreter. The BASIC interpreter is a work-in-progress.
Comparing JVM Performance With Pure Native Performance. This is in responce to Justdoro's brilliant comment to my earlier post on the performance of JVM COBOL. "Interesting how you improved the batch times by factoring out the JVM startup times. What is the timing impact of doing the same for the native batches? That is, create a native stub that loads batch COBOL .dlls. " I had considered this but not done a thorough test, so it is great that some has asked me to! Native code does not do a JIT phase and so there should be very little difference between multiple invocations of a process and running multiple times from within the process other than the 'launch overhead' I discussed in the previous post here. But - that is just theory - how about proving it.
Well, here goes. I quickly coded up the following bit of COBOL which does the timings in native for repeated invocations of the two dlls created from the programs which were used before. So, here is the code: Next I re-ran the bench_demo.js script in Rhino and here are the results: Native COBOL: Performance Tips For Micro Focus Managed COBOL - 1. Managed COBOL Performance Tips - 3. Third of a series of video tutorial covering performance programming tips for Micro Focus Managed COBOL. Please see here for the first, introductory video. This video looks at applying optimization techniques to existing code with minimally invasive local changes to source. To see on Youtube check here or see below. Don't forget this can be seen in 720p and it looks best expanded or full screen.
The default is 360p click on resolution selector at the bottom right of the viewer for other options. The program being discussed in this video is here: $set sourceformat(variable) program-id. Micro Focus Managed COBOL Performance Tips - 2. Second of a series of video tutorial covering performance programming tips for Micro Focus Managed COBOL. Please see here for the first, introductory video. This video looks at optimizing group items to 01 level items and the massive speedups this can produce. To see on Youtube check here or see below. Don't forget this can be seen in 720p and it looks best expanded or full screen. The default is 360p click on resolution selector at the bottom right of the viewer for other options. The program being discussed in this video is here: $set sourceformat(variable) program-id.
Getting The Job Done -> COBOL Accessing Microsoft Office. COBOL is a heavy lifting, work-a-day language right? So how about coupling it with Excel? Today someone asked me about making an Excel/VBA single user application into an Excel/COBOL multi-user application. I might well get around to doing more posts on this, but for now I have quickly put together a demo of loading up Excel from Micro Focus Visual COBOL (managed/.net code) and then loading data into a spread sheet. Frankly, it is embarrassingly easy. So here it is! $set ilusing(Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel) $set ilusing(System.Type.Missing) program-id ExcelDemo.Program1. working-storage section. 01 my-excel type Application. 01 my-workbook type Workbook. 01 my-sheet type Worksheet. *> Under the covers, the Office interop uses COM to talk to MS Office *> applications. To get this to compile we need to add a reference to the solution to Microsoft Excel 12.0 Object Library (11 for Office 2003).
Note: this code is |Visual COBOL and uses the new - excellent - quoteless COBOL syntax. Fun With Visual COBOL. 'Table Of' Is Really Handy In Managed COBOL. Here Is An Example Of Using It And Having Fun Developing With The Visual COBOL IDE. Writing code should be fun; that way developers are most productive and produce the best code. Good IDEs with a feature rich language help to make developing fun. Today I have been using the Table Of feature in Managed COBOL in ways which are new to me. Above is a screen shot from me just hacking away (don't look at the code!). So - what is a Table Of? Table of binary-long(1 2 3 4 5 6) Creates a table of binary long (an array of int in C#) and populates it with the values 1 through 6. The obvious way to use this is in setting up a field 01 z binary-long occurs any value table of binary-long( 1 2 3 4).
I am not going to argue that the above is not wordy - it just plain is. 01 z binary-long occurs anyvalue table of binary-long( 1 2 3 4). The first bit defines a table but does not fix the size. Above we can see a me debugging through my code using Visual COBOL.