Taking advantage of visual cobol OOP capabilities when migrating legacy procedural cobol program

Hi John,

In my experience working with customers, it tends to be a combination of both. Many customers don't have the bandwidth to perform a complete rewrite of procedural COBOL to OO COBOL so they take a somewhat hybrid approach, perhaps adding an OO GUI front end written in WinForms, WPF or some other technology that then calls the existing procedural code modules. It is also quite common, in modernizing an application, to repurpose the existing application to run as web services and then to call them from a COBOL client or a client written in another language. This involves exposing the legacy code as a web service which normally would involve some type of OO wrapper around the code.

There are examples of this in the Visual COBOL Samples browser.

I hope that others will join the discussion here and chime in with their experiences...

Chris:

thanks very much for you great input, especially the idea of wrapping up legacy code as a web service, I can see where that would be incredibly useful to clients, when I see  newer things these Days I try and look at it from a standpoint of how I would have used it in my development 20-30 years ago and the web services would have been a much easier and efficient way to share my business logic with the rest of the development team helping us all, up until now I have only looked into REST web services in the JAVA  and .net platforms, so I’ll check out the examples you pointed out to see how our old friend COBOL can be used for this task

thanks again for your input

john