Re: Question-WYSIWYG and RMCobol on SCO

From: Tom Morrison (t.morrison_at_liant.com)
Date: 05/25/04 

Date: Tue, 25 May 2004 14:22:54 GMT

<sbelt@dpcsystems.com> wrote in message
news:<vgs3b0t30l7t9r91e2mi9r702qmn9jlck1@4ax.com>...

> The company I work for has used RMCobol and SCO Unix for the last 15+
> years. Now they want to put a graphical front end on our package.
> They want to keep running the SCO and use the cobol data files as they
> are.

One definition of 'graphical front end' that seems to interest a large
number of our customers is 'browser'. Do you consider 'browser' to be a
'graphical front end'?

One principal benefit of adopting the browser paradigm is that computer
users have come to expect different behavior from applications presented in
a browser than they have from GUI-based applications displayed on the same
display device at the same time. The browser paradigm (i.e. HTML forms) is a
better fit for most COBOL legacy applications.

> We have looked at VB, Liant's Cobol WOW, Flexis and Connx Solutions.

The tool of choice for browser-enabling, or for converting to web services
(which would allow a range of client tools), would be Liant's recently
released Xcentrisity (TM) Business Information Server (BIS).

http://www.liant.com/news/releases/20040405_bis.php3

Contact Liant sales for further information about BIS. Liant is holding
monthly seminars and workshops to introduce customers to this exciting new
technology, now available for Windows IIS and Apache/Linux (a SCO port
probably would be negotiable, but might not be the best approach, depending
on the applications needs).

> Has anyone successfully done this?

Yes.

> If you've tried and failed, are in
> the process of trying or have successfully done this, would you mind
> sharing any thoughts you might have, suggestions or products.

One thing that is common to almost any approach is: you must be prepared to
separate your business logic from the presentation logic. COBOL in general
has always had the ability to tightly intermix business logic and
presentation logic, with the result that most applications have
moderate-to-very-tight coupling between the two. Additionally, the
presentation logic has always been the most proprietary (e.g. COBOL vendor
specific) area of COBOL. BIS provides a mechanism that promotes the
necessary separation but, in a very real way, is far less proprietary than
the original program or any of the competitive approaches.

Best regards,

Tom Morrison

Liant Software Corporation

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