Yes, COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) is one of the oldest programming languages still in use. And COBOL has had such a low profile in recent years that you might be forgiven for thinking that it had all but disappeared.

But as stated in many studies, most commercial transactions are still based on COBOL – and there is no indication that this will dramatically change. Bill Hinshaw, founder and CEO of Cobol Cowboys, states that 'sheer cost and effort to replace COBOL is not an acceptable return on investment'. And in a Micro Focus study, 85% of respondents considered their COBOL applications to be strategic to their organization.

In contrast to the low reputation COBOL has, it has persistently evolved from a hardware / OS dependent procedural programming language to a modern development platform supporting Eclipse and Visual Studio. And the international COBOL standardization groups as well as the providers of COBOL development products are continuously working on future COBOL standards and products. 

We strongly believe in the future of COBOL and our motto is 'reuse instead of replace'.

Read more about COBOL ......

What is COBOL Modernization ?

Businesses that have critical existing COBOL applications, which provide the core operational infrastructure, are not exempt from a digital transformation mandate. In fact, there is a strong incentive to transform in order to leverage the value of their core operational systems — at a minimum, to keep up with innovation taking place elsewhere in the organization and ideally establish these applications as a platform for innovation.

The word modernization is used to describe ongoing innovation that’s worked into an application in periodic projects or more gradually over time. Sometimes applications run for a long time with only business or defect maintenance applied, then suddenly they need to be modernized as they lack important features relating to their user interface or the way data management is handled^[1].

Based on IDC, modernization can be structured into three levels^[2]:

• Hardware related
  there’s a cost saving requirement to replace old hardware like a mainframe or Mini computer with commodity hardware either internal or on a Cloud
• Process related
• Application related
  there are many reasons / requirements to touch existing COBOL applications: adapt the look and feel of “old-fashioned” user interfaces to state-of-the-art web interfaces including multi-language, open up from the closed COBOL file system to databases, and enhance these applications by adding new functionality like modern user authentication, online help, audit trail, and many more.

Depending on the respective business needs, any combination of the above can apply.

^[1]Joseph Gulla, Modernize Legacy Systems to Enable Full Potential, IBM Systems Magazine 2017
^[2]Peter Rutten & Ashish Nadkarni, Modernization: A flexible approach to digital transformation, IDC White Paper, July 2018

fccFrameWork Overview

Most Application Modernization products on the market are either focussing on re-deployment to a Cloud or are converting COBOL code to Java or C# (which doesn't solve the maintenence issue at all). As we strongly believe in the future of COBOL, the fccFrameWork motto is "Reuse rather than replace and bring COBOL and Java together". fccFrameWork is designed to protect the investments in COBOL applications by supporting real COBOL Application Modernizing rather than running complex, risky, and long-lasting redevelopment projects. Modernization in this context is related to a bunch of ready-to-use application modules supporting different storage models (Cobol file system, c-treeRTG, Databases), Online Help, multi-language, state-of-the-art authentication models, audit trail, job control, and many more.

And as fccFrameWork is created and maintained with COBOL development environments generating Java bytecode, the resulting applications are hardware agnostic and all functions & features are natively callable from customer COBOL applications but are also provided as methods for usage outside COBOL environments.