COBOL - Transformation
Surprisingly there still alot of Cobol code in the world. While there is great resistance to moving, the reality is the hardest part is the decision to move. Personally written alot of Cobol in the day. It was the main language in my college days, and did quite a few commercial systems using it.
The reality is, when you look at legacy systems, some creative scripting can extract a huge amount of work from the original environment, and quickly let you put togeather a replacement. I've done this for a ERP system, to take the original data, and recreate the whole system in just 4 weeks.
So what are the steps to doing something like this?
- Understand the underlying data, and final infrastructure config.
- Move the data into a modern environment. Often this involves writing some scripts to extract, and some scripts to import. Using a ORM (Object Relationship Manger) helps a lot here.
- Use scripts to generate the screens needed.
- Use a modern rules engine for business logic and flow such as Decision Manager.
- Test and Deploy.
Using a cloud based scaleable DB can increase performance, while still giving all the functionality of SQL, add in a fully flashed based storage, and you can get often 100x the performance of the old application.
While I've done this before, every system is different, and always makes it interesting and challenging.