David Crayford writes: >I'm not aware of any previous requirement for a mainframe >COBOL program to access a data base running on a different >platform.
That's fairly common. To pick an example, Oracle offers a product called Oracle Access Manager for CICS that allows COBOL (and other programming language) programs running in CICS to access Oracle databases. I think OAM4CICS also supports applications running outside CICS as it happens. To pick another example, CICS Transaction Server and IMS Transaction Manager support Web Services. COBOL applications are frequently Web Services consumers (clients), accessing remote applications and databases via Web Services protocols. To pick yet another example, it's a very common pattern for COBOL (and other programming language) applications running on z/VSE (inside or outside CICS Transaction Server) to access DB2 (or other databases) running on Linux on zEnterprise (or perhaps also on other platforms). z/VSE started providing standard, no additional charge support for remote database access several years ago. It's called the z/VSE Database Connector (DBCLI), and more information is available here: http://www.ibm.com/systems/z/os/zvse/products/connectors.html#dbcli Ze'ev Atlas asks: >Does the current incarnation of COBOL (and perhaps PL/I) have >a native UTF-8 string type. Yes, UTF-8 is supported in Enterprise COBOL. To get started, take a look at the following Enterprise COBOL 5.1 functions: ULENGTH, USUBSTR, USUPPLEMENTARY, UVALID, and UWIDTH. Those are all new in Version 5.1. More information here: http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/pdthelp/v1r1/topic/com.ibm.entcobol.doc_5.1/PGandLR/tasks/tputf8in.html The following page applies to Enterprise COBOL at least as far back as Version 4.1: http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/pdthelp/v1r1/topic/com.ibm.entcobol.doc_5.1/PGandLR/tasks/tpstr31.html And here's another code sample (applicable to Enterprise COBOL 5.1) which takes a table of Czech composer names (fun!) represented in UTF-8, determines their initials, and outputs the results (in EBCDIC): http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/pdthelp/v1r1/topic/com.ibm.entcobol.doc_5.1/PGandLR/ref/rputf8e.html Thus interacting with MongoDB in UTF-8 from your COBOL applications should be no problem whatsoever. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Timothy Sipples GMU VCT Architect Executive (Based in Singapore) E-Mail: [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
