12 Aug
2008
12 Aug
'08
8:15 a.m.
Steve Robertson wrote:
I have a friend that is working for a company Web-enabling a COBOL
application for the DOD. This is a mission critical application that
consists of thousands of data input screens and literally millions of
lines of code. It was determined that the only semi-reasonable method of
porting the application would be to use an automated tool.
The tool interprets the COBOL and spits out the mostly equivalent JAVA
code. I am told most of the code will not compile / run without serious
modification. So a developer, conversant in both COBOL and JAVA, has to
modify the already FUBAR code. The result is a multimillion dollar
hodge-podge of code that is absolutely unmaintainable!
My friend had been working on this project for the last 7 years and
expects to retire long before it is complete.
I would've just written web primitives for COBOL, if they don't already
exist.
Peace... Sridhar
or perhaps (automated) language translators; say from
Cobol to Java.
If you do an automated translation, the result will just be COBOL that's
written in Java. You won't be able to find *anyone* that's good at
maintaining that mess.
Eric