AcuCobol on a Tablet/Iphone/Ipad etc.

Forum|Forum|9 years ago
December 7, 2015
1 reply
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A

Anonymous

Hi

Has anybody some got any ideas how to get your Cobol application running on a tablet, iphone or android phone.

As I hear there will be a HTML5 opportunity in version 10.1 but as 10.1 is not released before ultimo 2016 and am afraid that we have to do something else in the meantime, to satisfy the demand from our customers.

Of course it would be nice to have the full application up and running, but another solution could also be to make a few programs available on that platform.

We are normally running a thin client in a windows environment

Best Regards

Steen

Thomas Morrison
Participating Frequently
Forum|Forum|9 years ago
December 7, 2015

Hi

Has anybody some got any ideas how to get your Cobol application running on a tablet, iphone or android phone.

As I hear there will be a HTML5 opportunity in version 10.1 but as 10.1 is not released before ultimo 2016 and am afraid that we have to do something else in the meantime, to satisfy the demand from our customers.

Of course it would be nice to have the full application up and running, but another solution could also be to make a few programs available on that platform.

We are normally running a thin client in a windows environment

Best Regards

Steen

The most expedient way would be to use Xcentrisity Business Information Server (BIS) for extend, exposing your application as a set of web services. By using web services you truly separate your business rules (implemented in AcuCOBOL) from the user interface (HTML/JavaScript in a browser). This approach will certainly be more useful in following years, because web services is non-proprietary and independent of implementation language. That is the promise - but it does come with some work in your COBOL code. You will probably need to refactor your application code to separate the business rules from the user interface.

My company has been using BIS (RM/COBOL variant) for years. We have migrated our user interface from very simple HTML in the early days to, in our present user interface, extensive use of jQuery and so-call Web 2.0 features. Most of the newer JavaScript frameworks are designed to use web services very effectively, either in a REST or SOAP architecture, or both, and in both classic desktop browsers as well as mobile.

A datasheet can be found here.

A tutorial for creating web services using BIS can be found here.

Best regards,
Tom Morrison
Hill Country Software

Tom Morrison, Consultant, South Carolina, USA