Veryant, a COBOL modernization vendor, is shipping three integrated new products, including a package designed to help companies improve productivity and reduce costs as they modernize COBOL legacy applications. The new offerings, Veryant ODBC, isCOBOL File Server, and isCOBOL Graphical Terminal, are new additions to Veryant isCOBOL Evolve (2011 Release 3), a platform for COBOL application development, deployment, maintenance, and modernization.
Overall, despite its perception as a "legacy" language, COBOL use is expanding worldwide, Dovid Lubin, vice president of technical operations for Veryant, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "We find COBOL use growing among our customer base," he says. "Many of our clients are now adding new functionality to their COBOL applications with features such as localized language capabilities and updated, modernized user interfaces. COBOL remains highly relevant for today's applications because of its business orientation, maintainability, and platform independence."
The isCOBOL Graphical Terminal is intended to provide the ability to modernize to a graphical user interface (GUI) without changing the terminal login deployment model, the vendor says. "Veryant's isCOBOL Graphical Terminal replaces the terminal emulator for COBOL applications where the user interface was programmed with COBOL ACCEPT and DISPLAY Statements, as is typical with COBOL programs developed on open systems since the late eighties," Lubin says. "It does not replace or compete with 3270 emulation solutions for COBOL applications with user interfaces programmed with such things as BMS or MFS Maps."
isCOBOL File Server provides access to files on a remote server for all supported file systems include Veryant JISAM and Micro Focus Vision, without requiring any changes to program code, the vendor says. This feature can be used with Veryant ODBC to access files on a Linux or UNIX machine, or a remote Microsoft Windows server.
isCOBOL File Server and isCOBOL Graphical Terminal are part of the isCOBOL Runtime Environment. isCOBOL Graphical Terminal is designed to run in conjunction with the isCOBOL runtime, and is not a standalone product, Lubin adds. "Applications developed with isCOBOL can interface with .NET environments through isCOBOL software's C language API."
For more details, go to the Veryant website.