Cobol Comes to the Cloud

With this release, the company has done a lot of work in bridging this legacy language to modern computing environments. The language can even be a viable choice for new projects, Anderton argued.

This JVM technical preview is a trial run for a full product-ready version in Visual Cobol R4, expected to be released in May. Micro Focus developed a Cobol compiler that can compile Cobol code into Java bytecode, making it runnable on any JVM platform. "The innovation is there, now the usability is not 100 percent there," Anderton said. This release, on the whole, will allow developers to start working with the JVM in anticipation for R4.

For this release, Micro Focus has as well extended basic Cobol with a number of additional C# and Java-like calls, with the idea that these constructs will make it easier for Java and C# programmers to use the language.

Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general research breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab's e-mail address is Joab_Jackson@idg.com

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