Different Flavours of COBOL ??

Different Flavours of COBOL ??

In this edition

Next Event COBOL ?? COBOL: Facts & Figures ?? COBOL & AI ?? JOBOL ?? COBOL Tuning Tips ?? Call for Help ?? Potpourri - various stories & updated links ??


Intro

Our Mainframerz Meetup returns with the popular topic of COBOL with a new line up of speakers for you.

Mainframerz: Passionate about the mainframe (follows)


The Different Flavours of COBOL Event

14th March 2024 - London (Speakers TBC)

Mainframerz invites you to our next hybrid event this Thursday March 14th all about "The Different Flavours of COBOL". The event has confirmed speakers Roland Koo Koo from IBM, Erik Weyler eyler from SEB, and COBOL SME superstar Derek Britton .


The different flavours of COBOL

More Details

In person

? For anyone who is able to get to central London, we would encourage you to attend in-person. Location: Function Room, The White Hart, 22 Great Suffolk Street, London, SE1 0UG

? 17:00 Onwards - Meet & greet with core team, seated for 17:30 start time

? 17:30 - 18:30 Live event attend ?? here: ??

? 18:30 - 20:30 Network {socialise} with attendees & the core team

Please note

? To register for in-person attendance, please email [email protected] with your full name {and optionally your employer name}, sign-up before seats run out.

? Food (I'm not sure if ice-cream will be available), and drinks will be available to purchase at the venue.

'Sharing is Caring': Share Orlando 2024

One person asked me why we decided to theme that our next event around COBOL, apart from it being a very popular topic the other reason is that next week SHARE (The US equivalent of GSE) takes place and we wanted to bring content that would not be seen at SHARE and to bring something fresh.

Good luck to everyone who is attending Share, find out more here:


COBOL: Facts & Figures

I read an interesting post from Jennifer Osborne who shared some interesting facts and figures around COBOL, the original post is available here:

Recently described as 'the second most valuable asset in the United States', you may be surprised to learn that COBOL:
?? Handles over 70% of the world's business transactions - including 95% of all ATM swipes
?? Supports more than $3 trillion in daily commerce
?? Is used by around 450 of the Fortune 500 companies

Face it, there is nothing that can replace?COBOL

TechSpot have published an article on COBOL & AI which I wanted to share; before our Mainframerz Events I like to look for and share articles that create talking points either in the comments section of the newsletter or at our event.

A few of the areas that caught my interest from the TechSpot post are below and the full post can be found here:

The big picture: COBOL is decades old yet it still dominates our IT ecosystem and even the economy. But a replacement must be found, if only because the number of developers that can work on the language is dwindling. Is AI the answer?
It's 60-plus years old and there are better and more modern programming languages out there, but COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) is still with us. Not only is it an active part of the IT ecosystem, but it dominates it when it comes to the use of mainframe computers.
It persists, though, for a variety of reasons. Mainframes, as antiquated in IT years as they are, are still prized for their resiliency and security and, more importantly, are still able to carry on with the massive batch processing for which they were designed. These IT resources also represent a significant sunk cost for the businesses that have them and making the case for a modern platform at the cost of millions of dollars is difficult. Also, many software providers' toolsets can interface with COBOL, which makes maintenance possible. It's even possible to move COBOL to the cloud

Are mainframes antiquated or is this a myth we need to change?

Is the cost of a mainframe a challenge or another myth we need to change?

Do we lack the ability to support COBOL?

Most fundamentally, though, COBOL persists because it has no obvious successor. Sure, there are modern languages like Java or C# that could replace COBOL but for all the reasons above businesses and governments are not moving forward with them.

Is COBOL still the best solution when combined with a modern mainframe that can interface with modern solutions?

Have you heard about JOBOL?

JOBOL is the name given when COBOL code is converted to JAVA and Glauco Reis very recently posted a very interesting article on this subject.

A COBOL program is ideal for business activities and handling business information. It's not suitable for modern things like extensive use of messaging, REST, SOAP, events and other things we hear a lot about today.
The point is that even business-oriented systems cannot afford to ignore modernities, such as integration with social networks, mobile technologies and other mechanisms that talk directly to customers. Therefore COBOL needs to communicate with these technologies. But this conversion cannot be "frivolous", like putting in an AI-based meat grinder that converts the 200 billion lines of code to a more "modern" language, such as JavaScript, Python, C# or Java.

The post by Glauco helps explains some of the challenges with COBOL in a way that non-COBOL programmers / developers will find easy to understand, the full post is available here:

COBOL Performance Tuning Tips

A quick video from Mainframe Forum may be interesting it offers COBOL performance tuning advice to gain valuable insights on improving Mainframe efficiency with these COBOL Performance Tuning Tips.

Did you know?

You can Transfer your {COBOL Copybooks} Mainframe Data to {Google Cloud Platform} GCP BigQuery using Google's Mainframe Connector, thank you to Anders B?cklund



? ?? Potpourri {mainframe & non-mainframe stories} ?

? Useful Links & Request for help ?

Recently I spoke with one of my connections who is looking to find a PL/1 trainer and I said I would add this request to the newsletter; why because it gives me the opportunity to remind everyone of some helpful links we offer and for newer subscribers / readers of the newsletter it highlights the ways we as a mainframe community have come together to try and help each other.

?? ?? Join our Slack Channel

?? ?? NEW: Help find a Mainframe role

The first link is to join our slack group and the job channel we offer, through our job channel you can ask questions and post/view jobs for free.

The second link is to help you in finding roles advertised that you may have missed, with a useful way to search LinkedIn for roles.


I have summarised the request from Venkat Trainer below with his contact details.

? I am looking for PL1 expert who can create videos on all the topics of PL1.
? Remuneration 1,00,000(around 1lak- based on depth content)..we will give Mainframe environment to do show demos and recording environment.. you can do this task from your home only... no need to teach someone...
? Please contact me, if you are interested: Venkat Trainer +91 79977 45085 (Hyderabad)

? Useful links for DevOps ?

I always like to share helpful links and tips when I find them to help benefit our mainframe community, this time I would like to share a link to a post from Ann Afamefuna who has provided a number of links for training for DevOps, you can read her post here:

Over 20 Topics are covered with many more links:-

? DevOps Pre-requisite

? Networking

? Linux

? Shell scripting

? Git & GitHub

? Databases

? Artifact Repository Manager

? Docker

? Jenkins

? AWS

? SSH {Mobaxterm}

? SSH {Putty}

? Yaml

? Kubernetes

? Helm

? Terraform

? Python

? Ansible

? Prometheus

? Grafana

If you work in DevOps and would like to build your skills this is one of many posts that Anna has made.

All the topics above can be found in the Useful Links section at the bottom of the newsletter, available via the link below:-

?? View our list of useful Guides, Tips & Resources



Useful Links

If you haven't yet visited any of the links at the bottom of the newsletter, please have a look we try to keep all of the links up to date for you and they are always worth taking a look at:-

? Help with a job - Searching for a job - posting a job (free)

? Useful resources - lots of resources

? Link to join our Slack Community

? Plus much much more

Our links hopefully offer something for everybody please take a look.

If you would like to add to these links please message so that I can review your post for addition.

Linux Tech Tips discusses COBOL

Lastly a post which caught my eye was from Emma Skovg?rd who posted a short post about Linux Tech Tips and that during a recent podcast the topic of COBOL was discussed rather positively.

It seems that everywhere I look people are talking about COBOL.

You can read the post with the link to the podcast here:


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{stay up to date on our events "event agendas" "dates" "Link to join event"}


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Mainframe Forum

Mainframe Forum: A comprehensive repository for programming tutorials and technology news.

9 个月

Andy, thank you so much for including our video!

Jennifer Osborne

Technical Specialist - COBOL

9 个月

Thank you for the feature!

Georges Kopp

Directeur administratif et financier / IBM Champion 2024 / IBM Champion 2023 / IBM Champion 2022 / IBM Champion 2021 / IBM Master the Mainframe 2019 Regional winner

9 个月

Thank you Andrew (Andy) McCandless! Can't wait!

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