On Thu, 14 Jul 2005 12:05:39 -0500, McKown, John <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >I agree that developing COBOL on the zSeries cost more in terms of man >power than, say, VB. Why? Because VB comes with a lot of packaged >subroutines for many functions that the COBOL people end up programming >themselves. VB does OOP fairly well. COBOL does OOP, but our programmers >are never sent to any training (too expensive!), so that are almost >terminally ignorant of anything more advanced than "in-line PERFORM". >They just learned about EVALUATE and went to heaven about how much >better it was than nested IFs. IMO, this is a management problem. They >don't want to spend money training __anybody__. So the people who know >the newer, faster, development techniques are the younger people, who >mainly know Windows or UNIX from college.
Reuse has really stunk for years, even in the OO AND VB worlds. There have been cases where businesses have done a good job of this (even with existing, traditional COBOL technology), but those are few and far between. The emergence of SOA for application development and construction promises (yeah, I know, you've heard it before...) to be much more effective in encouraging reuse, and it's a technique that does not preclude the use of traditional programming languages for constructing reusable services. For example, I can build a CICS transaction using COBOL or PL/I, and it can be presented as a service for use in a larger composite transaction/service. > >Our IDE is TSO/ISPF. 'Nuff said comparing that against something like >the Windows Visual Developer, or Eclipse, or even Netbeans. I would >dearly love a really good, inexpensive, IDE for z/OS COBOL development. >Especially if it could be integrated with the z/OS system (avoiding >things like explicit FTPs or other file transfer). IMO, the problem is >that if a vendor does develop something like that, they will price it in >the stratosphere compared to Visual Developer. Putting on my IBM hat here...have you looked at WebSphere Developer for zSeries (aka WSED)? With that, you have the option of doing COBOL, PL/I, or Assembler development locally on the workstation and seamlessly performing that "file transfer" when ready, or creating a "remote project" that lives on the host, with the coding work taking place on the workstation, and no explicit file movement. I don't know what your definition of "expensive" is, but I suppose one could make the case either way on that front... Bill Seubert zSeries Software I/T Architect IBM Corporation [EMAIL PROTECTED] Charter member of the "Move-it-to-the-Mainframe Alliance" :-) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
