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Has anyone ever been part of any kind of migration from Cobol to anything else ? What happens to underlying hardware - is it even possible to migrate from main

• candiodari 10y ago
  Nobody uses mainframes anymore (except banks). They have emulators however, that emulate a mainframe on windows.
  • 0x445442 10y ago
    Not true. I recently worked at a major auto parts retailer and all part pricing and availability data was stored in mainframes. Currently I work for a major insurance company which has multiple data centers with many, many mainframes... Think ~60K square feet worth of mainframes per data center. Mainframes are pervasive and aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
• 0x445442 10y ago
  I worked on a project to convert a city's billing and payment system for their water department from COBOL to JEE. It was actually pretty straight forward. The key to the project was being to easily convert the data in the mainframe to standard RDBMS tables, Oracle. After that it was just a matter of "mapping" the green screens of the system to web pages, i.e. displaying the same data and providing the same actions. The only time I really needed to grok any COBOL was when there were discrepancies between the old green screens and the new web pages. After a period of user testing it was basically do the final data dump to Oracle, turn on the new system and turn off the old one. However, there were many other programs running on the mainframe so the hardware didn't go anywhere.