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 NEWSPERCobol whips Cobol into shape for budget-minded enterprises By James R. Borck, InfoWorld Test Center August 11, 2000 LEGACYJ'S PERCOBOL 2.5 is a low-cost tool that's best suited for companies with small and midsize conversion projects. If you're looking to reinvigorate portions of your Cobol resources without imposing a high price tag, PERCobol could be the answer.
The product delivers a graphical development IDE (integrated development environment), Microedge's Visual SlickEdit, along with a compiler and run-times to convert, compile, debug, and deploy Cobol applications. (For nongraphical systems, there's also a command-line interface.) Your applications can be either PERCobol applications that allow Java to embed directly into existing Cobol or Java applets for client-and server-side use. PERCobol works by analyzing and dissecting your original Cobol code to re-create the same program in Java, producing multiple source and class files of equivalent functionality. The remaining Cobol program is then "wrapped" in Java, encapsulating the initialization routines to run as either an application or applet. Deploying PERCobol applications means distributing the compiled class files, along with Java System and Foundation class libraries and a PERCobol run-time library that provides additional functionality for Java-enabling your Cobol code. Moreover, PERCobol comes with its own programming language, which comprises a set of easy-to-grasp constructs that extend the capabilities of standard Cobol so it can interface with Java. PERCobol ships with a comprehensive set of reference manuals (although it could have used a tutorial or two to help developers get their feet wet). In addition to generating JavaBeans, PERCobol allows you to embed Java code and JavaBeans directly into Cobol. A handy utility automates the analysis and importing of existing JavaBeans, streamlining the process considerably. Other utilities include a handy make file feature for quickly rebuilding and compiling outdated file dependencies and a development file server to facilitate testing across network file systems. PERCobol can be used on a variety of development platforms, including Windows, Linux, and Solaris. If you're looking to build and deploy applications on different platforms, you face an additional 10 percent fee. PERCobol is easy to use, too. In our tests, the IDE interface was a snap to navigate. We were productive right off the bat, thanks to PERCobol's color-coded editors, split windows, and features for editing, compiling, debugging, and executing programs. On the other hand, some features were missing, such as a basic word wrap and the ability to jump to a line of code from a compilation error -- a feature that can be found in almost every other mainstream IDE. As for debugging, PERCobol offers a basic graphical debugger that, unfortunately, works only on Cobol. That means you have to debug your Java code with a separate utility. Still, the product furnishes the usual array of helpful tools, such as break/watchpoints and variable, memory, and thread views. Although it's clearly a lower-end tool, PERCobol can help you improve the portability of your applications. To that end, there's also support for IBM's MQSeries messaging, as well as interactive transactional subsystems, such as CICS mainframe query system. (Note: The version of PERCobol we tested was missing features that, according to LegacyJ, will let text-based Cobol programs incorporate graphical elements without necessitating major code rewrites. LegacyJ has indicated that these features will be included in the final release, expected Sept. 1.) James R. Borck (james_borck@infoworld.com) covers e-business technologies for the Test Center.
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