Useful Middleware from Transoft

January 31, 2009

The addled geese here near the mine drainage runoff pond enjoy COBOL. Some of the younger information technology wizards in Big Impressive Companies enjoy COBOL not so much. For the php and python crowd, help has arrived from a unit of Iris, which is not exactly a household name in Harrod’s Creek.

Iris is a software company with over 1,000 employees worldwide. As I recall, the company is one of the largest in the UK. The company has thousands of licensees. Now its Transoft unit offers CIO. Think of the middleware as a wrapper which insulates today’s programming whiz kids from legacy applications written in COBOL. A representative use of CIO is a COBOL application that needs access to data on SQL Server. CIO translates data between the relational format used by SQL Server and COBOL application. With trophy generatiion kids somewhat unaware that memory in a mainframe can be corrupted with a bit here or a bit there, CIO will be useful. These little issues crop up at the most inopportune moments when the perl crowd finds that COBOL and its hierarchical databases don’t work like the Codd jobs in some organizations. Instead of mucking up the works with hacks, CIO can move COBOL code on to a relational database server such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle or DB/2. Happiness ensues for the lone mainframe consultant who tends the legacy systems for the trophy whiz kids. For more information, navigate to Transoft here.

Stephen Arnold, January 31, 2009

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