7 ms·

Cobol Web Development

105 points by gscott 7y ago

tolle 7y ago
I've done COBOL based web stuff on the IBM i/AS400. Nothing particularly tricky about it, wouldn't really recommend it for anything super complex. But it's less of a hassle then the various "tools" that's ment to make it easier, which always have horrible browser based configuration interfaces and stupid limitations. Just point Apache to a binary, read environmental variables and print to stdout. Using it doesn't really make sense as such, but developers who only know COBOL can just write regular programs and be done with it.
- numlock86 7y ago
  > But it's less of a hassle than the various "tools" [...] which always have horrible browser based configuration interfaces and stupid limitations. Can you share what exact "tools" you are talking about?
  - tolle 7y ago
    Well, tools is probably not the right wording. But solutions for making systems accessible over web APIs. There's usually in-house solutions. But IBMs own, "IWS"(https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/integrated-web-services-ibm-i-web-services-made-easy https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/integrated-web-services-ib...), is probably the main one I've heard of. I can't really remember all the solutions to serve up html pages. It works. You pass stuff in and out through what would best be described as ARGV. Some Java middleware and so on analyzes the program to determine the amount, name and length of in and out variabels. The process is that you choose to deploy a service, choose between SOAP and "REST" and point to your program. You then get to specify the resource name, description and a regexp for your path. The resource name becomes a part of the URL. You then specify which variables are input and which are output. And after that assign some generic settings and choose which variabels are sent in as a part of the path and not and so on. Works sorta nice. Some drawbacks are that you'll still need to add rewrite rules to get actual restful URLs, since the URL of your service will be along the lines of http://example.com/web/services/<resource http://example.com/web/services/<resource name/<your regexp>. If your program is written in COBOL instead of RPG, all variable names will be in all cap. There's a max size to how much data you can send in or return that's not super small, but around a few MB unless my memory fails me. I mean it's almost there, just not really good if you ask me. It could use some love. Also anything you're unsure of results in you having to dig into the hell hole that is IBMs website. Not exactly made easier by some buffoon naming the platform as such into a three letter name of one of the worlds biggest companies followed by a space and a single letter. So google is worse than useless. I've found most in-house solutions to be more reliable.
- LeftHandPath 7y ago
  Interesting. I've used PHP on the IBM i Series, for the sake of not using COBOL or RPG (...or C, or C++ - since I'm most familiar with PHP). I think it really does just come down to what language you're most familiar with.
arvidkahl 7y ago
Redhat's "Command Line Heroes" podcast has a very insightful episode about COBOL and Go, talking about legacy languages, and how all languages may or may not become legacy, and their impact on new paradigms like the web (and vice versa). https://www.redhat.com/en/command-line-heroes/season-3/the-infrastructure-effect https://www.redhat.com/en/command-line-heroes/season-3/the-i... My takeaway is that particularly with COBOL, there is a vested interest in the finance industry to find and retain COBOL talent, and making efforts to popularizing a language for the web is essentially a recruiting tactic more than anything else.
- non-entity 7y ago
  I wonder how the market for that is now, and how it will be a decade from now. I imagine a lot of the people with significant experience working with COBOL and mainframes are getting older and retiring
  - cmiles74 7y ago
    Eventually companies will pay people to get up to speed on older technology like RPG and COBOL. For sure, they are fighting it hard, but I don't see a lot of other options. It's harder for me to imagine all of this legacy software being replaced with new code.
    - OGWhales 7y ago
      It is substantially cheaper to train people and training people in COBOL is easy. Some businesses are starting to realize and even try to encourage IBM to do more to promote their products. As another user said, allowing people to spin up z/OS would be awesome. As of now, it's not really practical to learn without direct access to mainframes. So all the cost is on the business to train devs. Which is not as important in other dev positions
  - RandallBrown 7y ago
    I used to work in a medium sized college town in the midwest that basically had 4 places for software developers to work. The university, the "fun" software company (where I worked), and a couple insurance companies. We hired a lot of people from the insurance companies and they all basically said that they would hire anyone with a science type degree that was willing to learn COBOL.
bencollier49 7y ago
I put together a REST API for COBOL a while back: https://www.bencollier.info/cobol/programming/projects/fun/retrocomputing/2019/03/26/cobol-60-give-rest-framework-birthday.html https://www.bencollier.info/cobol/programming/projects/fun/r... The blogpost describes how to get the web stuff done, then moves on to API routing. This post has reminded me that I need to write part two of the article which covers parameter handling and so on...
Bnshsysjab 7y ago
I’m gonna save this link for when my dev friends complain about their jobs
- gchamonlive 7y ago
  Sure, there is always going to be someone working a less comfortable job, but that should not keep people from pursuing better working conditions. On the contrary, those working in less favorable conditions should be the ones to take other jobs as an example and precedent to make their job better.
ozzmotik 7y ago
I'm certainly surprised I don't see a mention of http://www.coboloncogs.org/INDEX.HTM http://www.coboloncogs.org/INDEX.HTM anywhere.
- etaioinshrdlu 7y ago
  Also: https://github.com/azac/cobol-on-wheelchair https://github.com/azac/cobol-on-wheelchair
  - ASalazarMX 7y ago
    I'm in a mix of offense and amusement because COBOL on Cogs is the joke and COBOL on Wheelchair is the serious one.
    - ozzmotik 7y ago
      oh man after actually looking at the website again, I realized that I had the two confused for some reason and posted the wrong one. at least someone came through and gave the proper one.
ivanhoe 7y ago
What are the actual business opportunities for cobol programmers? Are there chances for remote work, freelance consulting per project, etc. ? Or it's just office jobs in banks?
- bdavis__ 7y ago
  Although there is perceived demand, COBOL jobs pay very poorly. Like $50K. Exception of course for consultants with a following, and customers that believe you have 'unicorn' skills. One advantage is the software stack is mature and not subject to fads and fashion.
  - sigzero 7y ago
    This is the first post I have ever read that stated: "COBOL jobs pay very poorly".
    - the_af 7y ago
      If it helps, it's my experience as well. COBOL consultancy is a niche, but one that pays poorly (against what internet common sense would have you believe). All the COBOL consultants I know are not doing particularly well; they are mostly old guys who naturally ended up in that role. They occasionally must switch jobs when their services are no longer needed. The new jobs don't pay well either. They usually do not want or can learn new skills. There is young blood learning COBOL, but really, they don't stay long doing that. If you're young and in tech, there's a world of more exciting opportunities out there.
      - ivanhoe 7y ago
        There's also a lot more competition. Question is just how hard is it to get outsourcing contracts in COBOL world?
        the_af 7y ago
        Young people tend to prefer excitement to lack of competition. COBOL has a terrible rap, so the kind of young people who would still work with it are a self-selecting group... in a bad way.
scrp 7y ago
A great history of web designs in the links (for those that still works) in that page
- dominicr 7y ago
  Animated gifs, grey backgrounds, tables for layout, frames & sub 100Kb page sizes. I remember those days fondly. A lot of web development was much easier back then but could also be very frustrating trying to get the simplest things to work.
- tudelo 7y ago
  I find this one interesting: http://www.ils-international.com/goldmine/webcobol.htm http://www.ils-international.com/goldmine/webcobol.htm
  - jrumbut 7y ago
    I would really like to hear more from the author of these pages: http://www.cobolgoldmine.com/ http://www.cobolgoldmine.com/ http://www.coboloncloud.com/ http://www.coboloncloud.com/
perspective1 7y ago
I wonder how long this could last in a container on kubernetes with a million other microservices. Could the author develop something so rock-solid nobody looked at it until after they left? Then imagine the face on the intern asked to add feature X years later after they dig into the code.
exabrial 7y ago
COBOL is a loose abstraction over assembly. Don't laugh, it's fast, and it'll outlive you.
- msla 7y ago
  COBOL is jq for column-oriented data. SQL is COBOL for relational data. COBOL is a loose abstraction over 1950s assembly languages. You know, the ones with built-in support for decimal arithmetic and no support for recursion.

105 points by gscott 7y ago

I've done COBOL based web stuff on the IBM i/AS400. Nothing particularly tricky about it, wouldn't really recommend it for anything super complex. But it's less of a hassle then the various "tools" that's ment to make it easier, which always have horrible browser based configuration interfaces and stupid limitations. Just point Apache to a binary, read environmental variables and print to stdout. Using it doesn't really make sense as such, but developers who only know COBOL can just write regular programs and be done with it.

numlock86 7y ago
> But it's less of a hassle than the various "tools" [...] which always have horrible browser based configuration interfaces and stupid limitations. Can you share what exact "tools" you are talking about?
- tolle 7y ago
  Well, tools is probably not the right wording. But solutions for making systems accessible over web APIs. There's usually in-house solutions. But IBMs own, "IWS"(https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/integrated-web-services-ibm-i-web-services-made-easy https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/integrated-web-services-ib...), is probably the main one I've heard of. I can't really remember all the solutions to serve up html pages. It works. You pass stuff in and out through what would best be described as ARGV. Some Java middleware and so on analyzes the program to determine the amount, name and length of in and out variabels. The process is that you choose to deploy a service, choose between SOAP and "REST" and point to your program. You then get to specify the resource name, description and a regexp for your path. The resource name becomes a part of the URL. You then specify which variables are input and which are output. And after that assign some generic settings and choose which variabels are sent in as a part of the path and not and so on. Works sorta nice. Some drawbacks are that you'll still need to add rewrite rules to get actual restful URLs, since the URL of your service will be along the lines of http://example.com/web/services/<resource http://example.com/web/services/<resource name/<your regexp>. If your program is written in COBOL instead of RPG, all variable names will be in all cap. There's a max size to how much data you can send in or return that's not super small, but around a few MB unless my memory fails me. I mean it's almost there, just not really good if you ask me. It could use some love. Also anything you're unsure of results in you having to dig into the hell hole that is IBMs website. Not exactly made easier by some buffoon naming the platform as such into a three letter name of one of the worlds biggest companies followed by a space and a single letter. So google is worse than useless. I've found most in-house solutions to be more reliable.
LeftHandPath 7y ago
Interesting. I've used PHP on the IBM i Series, for the sake of not using COBOL or RPG (...or C, or C++ - since I'm most familiar with PHP). I think it really does just come down to what language you're most familiar with.

arvidkahl 7y ago

Redhat's "Command Line Heroes" podcast has a very insightful episode about COBOL and Go, talking about legacy languages, and how all languages may or may not become legacy, and their impact on new paradigms like the web (and vice versa). https://www.redhat.com/en/command-line-heroes/season-3/the-infrastructure-effect https://www.redhat.com/en/command-line-heroes/season-3/the-i... My takeaway is that particularly with COBOL, there is a vested interest in the finance industry to find and retain COBOL talent, and making efforts to popularizing a language for the web is essentially a recruiting tactic more than anything else.

non-entity 7y ago
I wonder how the market for that is now, and how it will be a decade from now. I imagine a lot of the people with significant experience working with COBOL and mainframes are getting older and retiring
- cmiles74 7y ago
  Eventually companies will pay people to get up to speed on older technology like RPG and COBOL. For sure, they are fighting it hard, but I don't see a lot of other options. It's harder for me to imagine all of this legacy software being replaced with new code.
  - OGWhales 7y ago
    It is substantially cheaper to train people and training people in COBOL is easy. Some businesses are starting to realize and even try to encourage IBM to do more to promote their products. As another user said, allowing people to spin up z/OS would be awesome. As of now, it's not really practical to learn without direct access to mainframes. So all the cost is on the business to train devs. Which is not as important in other dev positions
- RandallBrown 7y ago
  I used to work in a medium sized college town in the midwest that basically had 4 places for software developers to work. The university, the "fun" software company (where I worked), and a couple insurance companies. We hired a lot of people from the insurance companies and they all basically said that they would hire anyone with a science type degree that was willing to learn COBOL.

bencollier49 7y ago

I put together a REST API for COBOL a while back: https://www.bencollier.info/cobol/programming/projects/fun/retrocomputing/2019/03/26/cobol-60-give-rest-framework-birthday.html https://www.bencollier.info/cobol/programming/projects/fun/r... The blogpost describes how to get the web stuff done, then moves on to API routing. This post has reminded me that I need to write part two of the article which covers parameter handling and so on...

Bnshsysjab 7y ago

I’m gonna save this link for when my dev friends complain about their jobs

gchamonlive 7y ago
Sure, there is always going to be someone working a less comfortable job, but that should not keep people from pursuing better working conditions. On the contrary, those working in less favorable conditions should be the ones to take other jobs as an example and precedent to make their job better.

ozzmotik 7y ago

I'm certainly surprised I don't see a mention of http://www.coboloncogs.org/INDEX.HTM http://www.coboloncogs.org/INDEX.HTM anywhere.

etaioinshrdlu 7y ago
Also: https://github.com/azac/cobol-on-wheelchair https://github.com/azac/cobol-on-wheelchair
- ASalazarMX 7y ago
  I'm in a mix of offense and amusement because COBOL on Cogs is the joke and COBOL on Wheelchair is the serious one.
  - ozzmotik 7y ago
    oh man after actually looking at the website again, I realized that I had the two confused for some reason and posted the wrong one. at least someone came through and gave the proper one.

ivanhoe 7y ago

What are the actual business opportunities for cobol programmers? Are there chances for remote work, freelance consulting per project, etc. ? Or it's just office jobs in banks?

bdavis__ 7y ago
Although there is perceived demand, COBOL jobs pay very poorly. Like $50K. Exception of course for consultants with a following, and customers that believe you have 'unicorn' skills. One advantage is the software stack is mature and not subject to fads and fashion.
- sigzero 7y ago
  This is the first post I have ever read that stated: "COBOL jobs pay very poorly".
  - the_af 7y ago
    If it helps, it's my experience as well. COBOL consultancy is a niche, but one that pays poorly (against what internet common sense would have you believe). All the COBOL consultants I know are not doing particularly well; they are mostly old guys who naturally ended up in that role. They occasionally must switch jobs when their services are no longer needed. The new jobs don't pay well either. They usually do not want or can learn new skills. There is young blood learning COBOL, but really, they don't stay long doing that. If you're young and in tech, there's a world of more exciting opportunities out there.
    - ivanhoe 7y ago
      There's also a lot more competition. Question is just how hard is it to get outsourcing contracts in COBOL world?
      - the_af 7y ago
        Young people tend to prefer excitement to lack of competition. COBOL has a terrible rap, so the kind of young people who would still work with it are a self-selecting group... in a bad way.

scrp 7y ago

A great history of web designs in the links (for those that still works) in that page

dominicr 7y ago
Animated gifs, grey backgrounds, tables for layout, frames & sub 100Kb page sizes. I remember those days fondly. A lot of web development was much easier back then but could also be very frustrating trying to get the simplest things to work.
tudelo 7y ago
I find this one interesting: http://www.ils-international.com/goldmine/webcobol.htm http://www.ils-international.com/goldmine/webcobol.htm
- jrumbut 7y ago
  I would really like to hear more from the author of these pages: http://www.cobolgoldmine.com/ http://www.cobolgoldmine.com/ http://www.coboloncloud.com/ http://www.coboloncloud.com/

perspective1 7y ago

I wonder how long this could last in a container on kubernetes with a million other microservices. Could the author develop something so rock-solid nobody looked at it until after they left? Then imagine the face on the intern asked to add feature X years later after they dig into the code.

exabrial 7y ago

COBOL is a loose abstraction over assembly. Don't laugh, it's fast, and it'll outlive you.

msla 7y ago
COBOL is jq for column-oriented data. SQL is COBOL for relational data. COBOL is a loose abstraction over 1950s assembly languages. You know, the ones with built-in support for decimal arithmetic and no support for recursion.