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It's Business as Usual for Acucorp Customers


Extend 8 builds on Acucorp’s existing COBOL modernization platform

By David Worthington
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October 11, 2007 —  Micro Focus has a message for its Acucorp customers: It’s business as usual. At least until 2009, when the company expects to begin integrating its overlapping modernization solutions.

Acucorp product manager Robert Cavanagh explained that the existing schedule of service releases and promised feature set would remain in place, and that any changes to the road map will be publicized.

Acucorp recently released the latest version of the Extend interoperability suite, the first product release since the May acquisition by Micro Focus. Extend 8 adds the AcuXUI display engine and enhancements to the AcuXDBC database management system; this release adds support for x64 versions of Windows.

AcuXUI provides a Java-based display engine for Acucorp’s ACUCOBOL-GT graphical technology. Interfaces created with AcuXUI are portable to any JRE platform, claims the company. “Customers can evolve applications,” Cavanagh remarked, instead of starting from scratch.

Enhancements in the AcuXDBC update apply relational database and SQL concepts to COBOL index files. AcuXDBC now allows JDBC and ODBC applications to access Acucorp’s proprietary Vision file system through SQL statements. “It adds database-like functionality to an index file,” said Cavanagh.

Performance was another major emphasis of the new release, claims Micro Focus. Extend 8 produces intermediate code compiled from COBOL that is interpreted by the Extend runtime; its performance increases when the there are fewer instructions required for the runtime to execute the code. A new binary math package improves performance of arithmetical computing, said Cavanagh.

The product’s sort performance also received a shot of adrenaline. Faster sorting accelerates COBOL batch applications, where sorting has traditionally had the biggest impact on performance, Cavanagh added.

What’s more, the AcuBench has received a new WYSIWYG interface that generates complete COBOL programs. A new preprocessing utility, called Boomerang, accesses remote preprocessors.

Handling Overlap
The next major release is slated for 2009. Because both Acucorp and Micro Focus have ASCII-compliant compilers and runtimes, there is a lot of overlap between the company’s software assets, Cavanagh said. Instead of going forward with two separate sets of technology, Micro Focus will be updated to handle all of the proprietary extensions developed by Acucorp and will reuse existing runtime code wherever possible, he explained.

“The end goal is a transition release for Acucorp customers that provides Micro Focus customers with new technology that is very valuable,” Cavanagh added.





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