Modernizing Enterprise COBOL
Enterprise COBOL is a premier enterprise-class COBOL compiler on System z, powering many business-critical applications. Time proven and reliable, COBOL has a long history of delivering new and innovative features for developers to modernize key applications, and increase productivity.Modern System z servers—z10, zEnterprise 196 and zEnterprise EC12 (zEC12), for example—are designed with high-performance microprocessors and are reshaping the IT landscape. COBOL developers are expected to deliver new functions faster with higher quality and performance. As the hardware become more complex, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for application developers to simultaneously handle business logic and performance issues in the applications they’re working on. They need state-of-the-art compilation technology to provide advanced optimization and hardware exploitation to deliver leading-edge performance so they can focus on the business logic. To satisfy this requirement, Enterprise COBOL needs to transition to a new technology base to ensure timely delivery of System z hardware exploitation and advanced optimizations.
Improving Performance
Announced in April, Enterprise COBOL for z/OS V5.1 was re-architected to include a new optimization framework based on proven technology shipped in Java on System z. IBM has been shipping this technology since 2006. Unlike Java, this new framework for COBOL is static in nature. It provides advanced COBOL specific optimizations, and full z/Architecture exploitation (z900 through zEC12). A new option, ARCH, enables users to specify which z/Architecture to optimize their applications for. Increasing performance of COBOL applications provides savings in CPU utilization and the ability to meet service-level agreements.Enterprise COBOL V5.1 runs on z/OS V1.13 and later. It provides significant performance improvements over Enterprise COBOL V4. According to internal IBM test results, many well-structured, CPU-intensive batch applications have seen performance increases greater than 10 percent. Many numerically intensive programs have shown performance increases greater than 20 percent.
Users don’t have to optimize the entire application because optimized code works with non-optimized code. They can, therefore, achieve performance goals by selectively optimizing performance hotspots in an iterative and controlled way.
Maintaining Compatibility
Organizations can stage the upgrade effort to COBOL V5. They don’t need to recompile an entire application to use Enterprise COBOL V5. It’s source- and binary-compatible with older releases of COBOL compilers for System z. Most correct programs will compile and execute without changes, producing the same results. “Old” and “new” codes can interoperate within an application, communicating by static or dynamic calls.Some old language syntax and options have been removed in the new compiler. They include supports for millennium language extension, label declaratives, non-reentrant programs above 16MB, OS/VS COBOL inter-operation, AMODE 24, and XMLPARSE(COMPAT).
Modernizing Applications
Application modernization promotes reuse of proven software assets. Enterprise COBOL V5.1 enables developers to methodologically modernize existing COBOL applications and integrate them with new ones running on modern infrastructures (e.g., Web, cloud or mobile). It allows organizations to deliver new enhancements quicker with lower risk and cost.Enterprise COBOL V5.1 also supports Java 7 and provides users better control over generation of XML documents. It uses the z/OS XML parser, allowing parsing to be offloaded to specialty engines to reduce cost. It also provides support for unbounded tables and groups, which allows developers to enable top-down mapping of data structures between XML and COBOL applications.
As one IT architect with a North American health care company puts it, “XML is increasing in importance for our company, and IBM has enhanced XML support in Enterprise COBOL V5 with changes that allow us to take advantage of z/OS XML System Services to reduce the cost of COBOL-based XML processing.”
Improving Productivity
Enterprise COBOL V5.1 raised the total size of all data items in a working-storage or local-storage section to 2GB, and the maximum size of an individual data item to 999,999,999 bytes. New built-in functions are added to improve programmability of UTF-8 applications, thus improving COBOL applications’ ability to process UTF-8 data in DB2 and XML documents.The new release continues to allow debugging of optimized production code. Debug information is stored in the NOLOAD segment of the program object. As a result, the footprint of the executable won’t increase. To improve application maintainability, a new floating comment indicator (*>) is added for developers to use anywhere in the program-text area to indicate that the text on the line is a comment line.
“COBOL V5 emphasizes IBM’s commitment to our existing COBOL application base while improving its interoperability with our open systems components, explains Michael A. Todd, a software architect for a multi-national financial services company. “IBM has addressed a number of architectural limits within the previous compiler, thereby extending the life of my extensive COBOL inventory. They continue to improve XML capabilities and UNICODE support, enabling us to reuse existing components.”
Additional benefits offered by Enterprise COBOL V5.1 include:
- Reduced administration costs. The latest version supports a new level of z/OS System Management Facilities (SMF) tracking, allowing users who implement subcapacity tracking to reduce their administrative overhead.
- Support for the latest middleware. It provides up-to-date programming interfaces for latest CICS, DB2 and IMS. The integrated DB2 and CICS coprocessors enable strong integration with the latest middleware technologies.
- Support for modern development tools and solutions. By supporting the ecosystem of COBOL development tools from IBM and ISVs, it enables companies to expedite migration and application-performance tuning with IBM’s latest continuous integration solution.
COBOL Commitment
Enterprise COBOL for z/OS V5.1 affirms IBM’s commitment to COBOL customers on System z. With the new optimization framework, it delivers compelling performance improvement. Because it maintains source and binary compatibility with older COBOL releases, many applications may gain performance simply by recompiling the code.Going forward, the new optimization framework will provide a solid foundation for delivering a release-to-release performance improvement roadmap for COBOL on System z. Therefore, it’s important to stay current with latest COBOL technology. Organizations can’t maximize their return on investment unless they stay current with latest compiler technology.
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