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COBOL IDE, Compiler for Linux

Posted by michael on from the new-tricks-for-old-dogs dept.

Grizzly writes "Okay, go ahead and laugh. But there's a lot of COBOL out there, and that has kept a lot of businesses, especially outside the United States, from even looking at Linux. Linux and Main has a story on KOBOL and how it might make bringing those COBOL apps over to Linux possible."

3 of 26 comments (clear)

  1. TinyCOBOL ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Are you aware of the TinyCOBOL project? They are at version 0.58 and producing a true COBOL compiler, no translation to C first. They are targetting COBOL 85 first with an eventual production of a compiler with the most current standard available.

    The project is hosted on SF.net at http://tiny-cobol.sf.net/, check it out for more details.

  2. PerCobol LegacyJ by Gaetano · · Score: 3, Informative

    Another very attractive cobol tool that runs on linux (and windows, and Solaris, and so on) is PerCobol from LegacyJ.As the name would indicate its a java solution.

    http://www.legacyj.com/lgcyj_perc1.html

    My agency has had a developer trying to get Merants Cobol working on a Solaris system for some time now and hasn't had any luck getting it to connect to Oracle. All the instructions we could find refer to DB2, even those where incomplete. Merant was not willing to support us since we purchased the software directly from Sun.

    I couldn't find any instructions on getting Kobol to connect to Orable either, but its still a pretty new product so I will be revisiting it later. But with PerCobol it took about 1 hour to figure it out. (this is including the 30 minutes it took to download the 100mb evaluation copy).

    The cost of PerCobol is MUCH higher than Kobol's $39.95. Its more like 5000 dollars per developer (if you are deploying to a Solaris server which we are). But it still looks really good compared to what we have experianced with Merant and we can redeploy the mainframe applications to java applettes on our intranet with PerCobol with little trouble.

  3. PowerCOBOL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    I was turned off to COBOL in the beginning, until I tried Fujitsu PowerCOBOL for Win32. Programming with it is much easier than I imagined it to be. I made an interesting GUI in a couple of hours. The code is pretty readable too. I really think it's a myth that COBOL is dead and legacy only. The recent COBOL book from Sams was what got me started, and came with this compiler on CD.

    It's not perfect however, there are some annoying bits about the IDE, at least in the demo that I tried (based on an older release). I had to close the editing window before I could compile. It becomes annoying opening and closing the same window during tests. Hopefully this issue is solved in newer releases.

    I'm pleased that there will be KOBOL for Linux. I hope it measures up to PowerCOBOL eventually.