Micro Focus Brings COBOL to Familiar Development Environments

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Vendor: Micro Focus (www.microfocus.com)

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About Micro Focus

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Visual COBOL Brochure
COBOL has evolved and is breaking free. Visual COBOL R3 gives you freedom, choice and more: freedom to deploy wherever you want, JVM, .NET, Azure, choice of development environment, VS2010 or Eclipse and more COBOL language enhancements to deliver more productivity, faster. Read the Visual COBOL R3 brochure to learn more about COBOL: no barriers.

Visual COBOL Developer Hub Data Sheet
Learn more about centralized development services for Visual COBOL.

Visual COBOL for VS2010 Data Sheet
Explore Visual COBOL Visual Studio 2010 integration: extending the IDE.

Visual COBOL for Eclipse Data Sheet
Discover how Visual COBOL adds a "COBOL perspective" to Eclipse.

Known among programming languages for its accuracy, consistency and reliability, COBOL powers modern business and finance applications worldwide, helping businesses conduct millions of transactions every day.

Replacing the billions of lines of COBOL code behind these applications would be an immense and costly project that most businesses are unwilling or unable to afford. But businesses still need to find a solution for updating their COBOL code when changes are made to their applications.

Video: Visual COBOL Launch — Technical Demos
See what excited the COBOL world this past January. Watch the launch video and see Visual COBOL in action. The demo shows how to build COBOL applications within VS2010 and Eclipse IDEs integrating with .NET and other UI technologies — and much more, including COBOL applications running on an Android phone!

Micro Focus makes it possible to use COBOL in the development environment that programmers use on a daily basis with the release of Visual COBOL® Release 3 (R3). This latest version of the language also has an easy-to-learn syntax that is familiar to C# and Java developers, which makes it easy to get fresh recruits up and running quickly, overcoming the worry that retiring staff will take all the COBOL knowledge and experience with them. New COBOL programmers using Micro Focus Visual COBOL R3 will find that not only are the language skills easy to learn, but the application knowledge and business skills also provide greater insight into the applications they create.

Developers using Visual COBOL can use the Visual Studio and Eclipse integrated development environments (IDEs) for access to a rich set of tools that are further extended by a range of third-party productivity and analysis tools. With Visual COBOL R3 there are simply no limits to how developers choose to use COBOL and the applications they can create with it, even deploying applications to the cloud and mobile phones.

Visual COBOL for Visual Studio 2010

Visual COBOL delivers a rich development experience for COBOL programmers working with Windows. Micro Focus takes advantage of the new extensibility options included in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 to extend the IDE and make COBOL programmers highly productive. In parallel, the COBOL language has been enhanced to make it even easier to use for .NET applications.

Micro Focus Visual COBOL R3 adds further tools and examples to build modern Windows and Web applications along with the continued evolution of developer productivity features in the Visual Studio editor and debugger. It also introduces the first support for SQL Server Stored Procedures written in COBOL and for building and deploying COBOL applications for the Microsoft Azure platform.

Developers can take advantage of the fully integrated COBOL development environment in Visual Studio 2010 to increase their productivity and receive instant feedback as they work. The enhanced COBOL syntax for .NET programmers makes it easier for COBOL programmers to use .NET services or for programmers with .NET experience in other languages to be productive with COBOL.

Visual COBOL supports the development and deployment of both "managed" .NET (with multi-targeting for .NET Framework V4 and earlier versions) and "unmanaged" native code applications. It also includes new project templates for Web applications using Microsoft's ASP.NET framework.

Visual COBOL for Eclipse

Micro Focus Visual COBOL for Eclipse builds on the experience of the Eclipse option for Micro Focus Server Express and Net Express and Server Express Remote Development Option (RDO) to deliver a single solution for COBOL development across Linux, UNIX and Windows.

Micro Focus COBOL for JVM (Java Virtual Machine) introduces a unique, high-performance COBOL environment for developing COBOL applications to be deployed in a Java framework such as the Java JVM or a Java Enterprise Edition (JEE) application server. In addition to using Visual COBOL for Eclipse for applications deployed as native code, it is also the IDE for developing COBOL JVM applications with debugging support for both traditional or object oriented COBOL applications for the JVM.

The fully integrated COBOL development environment helps programmers increase productivity by exploiting Eclipse tools and delivering instant feedback on syntax errors while editing code. The enhanced COBOL syntax makes development of Object Oriented (OO) COBOL easier and helps integrate OO and Java classes into traditional COBOL applications.

Visual COBOL Development Hub

The Visual COBOL Development Hub provides central services for editing, debugging and testing applications that are going to be deployed on UNIX or Linux environments. The applications are treated as if they are local but are acting remotely. This saves time as users don't have to transfer code backwards and forwards, or try to simulate UNIX or Linux environments, further improving productivity. Traditionally, programmers were required to reproduce or emulate the Linux or UNIX server environment on their development computer, a time-consuming process that needs complex processes to perform system or integration-level testing.

The alternative approach of using a remote desktop or terminal session to access development tools on the Linux or UNIX server can reduce productivity because of limited tool support or network performance.

The Visual COBOL Development Hub and Visual COBOL for Eclipse solve these problems for programmers by providing a rich desktop development environment based on the Eclipse IDE with high-performance server-based tools for managing builds, source code access and a debugger engine. Developers can use the Visual COBOL Development Hub to maintain source code and build processes on a central server with access to the target platform databases and other services. It helps developers save time by working as a standalone, compile and debug environment.

The Future of COBOL: the Cloud and Mobile

Visual COBOL R3 extends COBOL into today's technologies — and tomorrow's — by enabling COBOL applications to be deployed to the cloud with Visual COBOL for Azure, and deployed to mobile phones that run on Android by targeting the JVM.