Survey Says: The Truth About COBOL and the World Economy
July 19, 2021
On June 14, 2021, the COBOL Working Group (CWG) of the Linux Foundation Open Mainframe Project (OMP) had the opportunity to present at the Marist Enterprise Computing Community (ECC) conference about a topic that shouldn’t be so surprising if people didn’t overlook how interesting and compelling it is—COBOL. Ah, COBOL: Common Business-Oriented Language—a name for […]
ArticlesOvercoming Unconscious Biases on COBOL and Women in Technology
July 12, 2021
TechChannel is excited to announce an upcoming monthly video series featuring conversations with women of COBOL, all of which will be moderated by (and is the brainchild of) Misty Decker, product marketing director, Micro Focus. Decker’s broad expertise within the mainframe ecosystem, along with her dedication to correcting misinformation and shifting unconscious biases, ultimately led […]
ArticlesHow to Use JSON in Your z/OS Program
July 7, 2021
First created in 2001, JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) has become the preferred way of creating structured data. Not limited to JavaScript applications, JSON formats can be found in web requests and responses and NoSQL databases. So, it makes sense that we will want our traditional z/OS programming languages (COBOL, PL/I, Assembler, C and REXX) to […]
PodcastsDerek Britton on the Language and Application of COBOL
July 1, 2021
Reg Harbeck: Hi, this is Reg Harbeck and today I'm here with my colleague Derek Britton who is a very active member of the enterprise computing community and especially the COBOL community. Derek, maybe if I can get you to start by tell us how did you end up being such an aficionado of both COBOL […]
ArticlesHorses for Courses: Choosing the Right Player, Platform and Tool in the COBOL World
June 21, 2021
“OCCURS DEPENDING ON” is a wonderful clause in COBOL that resonates powerfully with a favorite answer that IBMers like to give to big, generic questions about how to choose and configure their technology: “It depends … ” In the first case, the programmer may be asking for arrays, while in the latter the IBMer is […]
How the Software World and Programming Practices Have Evolved
June 3, 2021
Programming, or writing software as it is commonly known today, has been my profession for 51 years, and for fun for 10 years before that. Like most things, it has changed dramatically as I have grown up with it. Starting out in 1960, we had only one manual of about 50 pages, a principles of […]
ArticlesBound to Compile: Skipping the Source Code
May 31, 2021
I like interpretive and scripting languages: The source is the code so you never have to go hunting for the original text version of a program when updating it. But they do run much more slowly than compiled ones. Consequently, some scripting languages, like REXX, can also be compiled in order to speed them up. […]
ArticlesNode.js on z/OS: How Real Is It?
May 24, 2021
Node.js is a popular environment to allow JavaScript to run outside of a browser. A 2020 Stack Overflow survey saw 50% vote Node.js as the most popular framework, library or tool. Anyone working with the open-source mainframe framework Zowe will be familiar with Node.js: it’s needed for both the Zowe server and Zowe CLI. But […]
ArticlesHow to Simplify the Lives of Non-Mainframe Trained IT Employees
April 23, 2021
Many people think that using a mainframe is hard. They have a picture in their minds of green screens and arcane subsystems that are incredibly hard to get to grips with. The trouble is that so many of the people who work on mainframes have been doing so for 40 years. And that means they […]
ArticlesCOBOL: What’s XML Got to Do With IT?
March 24, 2021
When I first encountered the works of Thomas Aquinas, which I’m embarrassed to say wasn’t until the beginning of my Master’s degree, commenced 29 years after I completed my bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, the first thing I thought was, “This could be put into XML!” Little did I know that XML was a direct […]