This post contains an introduction to and demo of the mythical language that every programmer seems to know about but doesn’t really know: COBOL.
By learning about COBOL, you learn about basic concepts in computing in general, and how all of these languages are really doing a lot of the same activities underneath.
-Everything old is new again – Stephen King, The Colorado Kid
One of my most recent projects involved helping a client move many decades of code from a mainframe environment to a distributed Java web environment. The client had engaged another company to actually transform the mainframe code to Java, and our team was tasked with making it all actually work.
One of the major areas we had to deal with was the transition of all of the batch processes. Of course, Spring Batch came to our rescue for most of the work, and was an easy choice as we were already using Spring Boot to wrapper the converted applications.
The most challenging part of the entire project was that the client did not want to move everything at once in a Big Bang, but rather a few programs as a time. This meant that some programs would be running in the Java environment while others remained on the mainframe.
In this blog, I discuss three data challenges we encountered in the transition of an enterprise mainframe to Java web application with Spring Batch, how we overcame them, and tips to keep in mind going forward when in similar migration situations.
We have consultants who specialize in moving old to new, renovating dilapidated code bases, and designing brighter futures for enterprises who have been vendor-locked for most of their existence. We have come across some repeated patterns and strategies for how to approach modernization of legacy systems. In this blog, we will cover a strategy that is very popular right now, Re-Platforming.
The basic flow of this post will be:
Introduction to Modernization
High-level definition of the Re-Platforming Strategy for Modernization
Sample of Re-Platforming using Keyhole Syntax Tree Transformer, COBOL –> Java
Additional thoughts on the value/risk of this strategy
Let’s get started…
