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The company I work for has a massive COBOL legacy codebase which still handles the lion's share of our day-to-day operations. In the several years that I've bee

The company I work for has a massive COBOL legacy codebase which still handles the lion's share of our day-to-day operations. In the several years that I've been here, we've started migrating some functionality (reporting, etc) to a web-based application, but there are very-real tradeoffs when you start looking to migrate interactive processes away rom COBOL into a web application. Keyboard navigation and raw speed are two things that come to mind that we simply can't match. Curious if anyone has been tasked with replacing COBOL applications and what you eventually used to do so? Being of the web-programming persuasion, I was thinking Electron or Reactive Native for Windows to build something where I could have more control over the navigation experience and then focus heavily on keyboard navigation in the app. The business likes more interactivity, more visual UIs, but sorely misses what I mentioned above COBOL (or terminal-style) applications in general. Curious where a happy medium might land in terms of language/framework.

a2tech 5y ago
You can absolutely make a web interface that is snappier (not quite like a terminal application). You need to spend a lot of time with your layouts and jettison a lot of your web assumptions (like using javascript for a lot of things, spending a lot of time on tab progression, and forget about responsive designs). My current job when I started maintained a web app for a medical research outfit. The person that developed it came from a COBOL/RPG background and applied that knowledge to this application (which required tons of data entry via web forms). It was a python backend, minimal JS on the front end, and our data entry folks could fly when they were entering data. The endpoint that the data entry screens pointed to were implemented with speed in mind so saving a form was almost instant (from the user perspective).
- WesleyJohnson 5y ago
  Thank you for the anecdote. I'll have to do some more research in this area. We're using Django on the backend and minimal JS on the frontend already, though we have introduces some React in certain areas. I think, as you stated, we just have to double down on layouts, tab progression, etc and rethink what we think we know about web applications.
  - a2tech 5y ago
    For those screens that you want super snappy, you'll want them outside of Django. You'll want to get to where the page generation is as simple as possible on the server side and the endpoint you're POST'ing to is as performant as possible. SIMPLE is the name of the game when it comes to these kinds of things.
MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
Is COBOL somehow faster than any other back end language? I mean there is no way it's faster than C/C++.

a2tech 5y ago

You can absolutely make a web interface that is snappier (not quite like a terminal application). You need to spend a lot of time with your layouts and jettison a lot of your web assumptions (like using javascript for a lot of things, spending a lot of time on tab progression, and forget about responsive designs). My current job when I started maintained a web app for a medical research outfit. The person that developed it came from a COBOL/RPG background and applied that knowledge to this application (which required tons of data entry via web forms). It was a python backend, minimal JS on the front end, and our data entry folks could fly when they were entering data. The endpoint that the data entry screens pointed to were implemented with speed in mind so saving a form was almost instant (from the user perspective).

WesleyJohnson 5y ago
Thank you for the anecdote. I'll have to do some more research in this area. We're using Django on the backend and minimal JS on the frontend already, though we have introduces some React in certain areas. I think, as you stated, we just have to double down on layouts, tab progression, etc and rethink what we think we know about web applications.
- a2tech 5y ago
  For those screens that you want super snappy, you'll want them outside of Django. You'll want to get to where the page generation is as simple as possible on the server side and the endpoint you're POST'ing to is as performant as possible. SIMPLE is the name of the game when it comes to these kinds of things.

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago

Is COBOL somehow faster than any other back end language? I mean there is no way it's faster than C/C++.