FROM THE EDITORS

By SD Times News Team

January 1, 2007 —

Here it is, 2007, and developers and their managers are discussing how to best implement AJAX, how to create a service-oriented architecture, and how to flip COBOL applications.

Yes, even as other, more modern development tools and techniques have moved from must-have to commodity, we’re still talking about what to do with our COBOL applications.

The same folks who warned us that Y2K would mark the end of the computer world as we know it also told us that as our Baby Boom-era COBOL developers move toward retirement, we’ll all be stuck with mainframe applications that can’t be maintained, updated or even understood by the new pack of developers who are more Web- and object-oriented in their education.

Well, you can all let out a sigh of relief, because while your aging COBOL developers might be going away, they aren’t leaving as quickly as we have been told they would, and efforts are afoot to keep the language alive and relevant, and understandable to the next generation.

That’s because software vendors such as IBM are providing educational tools regarding mainframe programming, fighting against mainframe modernization vendors who stoke the fires of a “legacy skills gap” that they claim is fast approaching.

Sellers of software that helps organizations move their data off the mainframe and into Java, .NET or Web architectures are quick to point out numbers that show COBOL applications will not be able to be maintained long into the future. But research shows that the predicted COBOL exodus that was to occur between 2020 and 2030 will now be stretched out from 2005 to 2035, according to Forrester analyst Phil Murphy.

Few would argue that COBOL is excellent at dealing with huge volumes of data in corporate and governmental data centers. While moving off green screens and into Web-based services architectures has proven to give organizations greater flexibility to react to business opportunities and changes in their markets, nothing in the “new” paradigms can replace the mainframe for sheer processing power.

Mainframes are not going away. COBOL isn’t either. So let’s make a New Year’s resolution for 2007 and decide that obsessing over the widely reported “death of the mainframe” just won’t be a part of our lives anymore.

Six Thousand Pages
Ecma has approved Microsoft’s Office Open XML specification as a “standard.” The spec is now expected to be taken up by ISO, the International Organization for Standardization.

Microsoft pushed for recognition of its proprietary XML schemas in response to government regulations, both in the United States and internationally, which required that government documents be available in an open standard. Otherwise, regulators feared, a growing mass of documents, created in proprietary formats, would not only harm competition, but also give vendors (like Microsoft) a monopolistic choke hold for decades.

After many companies banded together to create a vendor-neutral document standard, called OpenDocument, Microsoft struck back by submitting Office Open XML to Ecma. The group, which made a few changes, then essentially rubber-stamped the document.

The fact that Office Open XML is huge—the specification document is 6,039 pages long—didn’t deter Ecma, which is a vendor consortium, not a disinterested standards body. The near impossibility that another software company might be able to create a 100 percent-compliant implementation of Office Open XML didn’t deter them, either.

So now, thanks to Ecma, Microsoft will be able to compete for government business, saying that because Office 2007 is standards-compliant, its documents meet all the requirements of the new regulations. Because Microsoft can leverage its Office monopoly, the software giant wins, and everyone else loses.

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