LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Cobol
built 197 days ago
Cobol (COmmon Business Oriented Language) was one of the first high-level programming languages, introduced in 1959 by the Conference on Data Systems Languages. Cobol helped to automate the business world with its proficiency at defining and manipulating complex data structures. Today, Cobol remains a stable and vital part of most large enterprise infrastructures.
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Cobol-CGI is a remarkably easy way to integrate your COBOL application with the Internet's World Wide Web. So easy in fact, that you can have your first COBOL program connected to the Web in a matter of minutes! With Cobol-CGI you directly connect your Web pages to COBOL programs. No need for a Perl interpreter or scripts. No need to rewrite your server programs to be event driven. Cobol-CGI makes it easy for your COBOL application to communicate directly with the Web.
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Cobol-RPC server programs require absolutely no special coding. They receive and return parameters in the Linkage Section, just as if they were called locally. Since server programs execute on the server, they can access server data directly without transferring data over the network. Only the parameters passed in a remote program call are transferred across the network. This allows Cobol-RPC to dramatically reduce network traffic and improve performance. Multiple levels of remote program calls are ... supported.
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The IT industry is suffering an acute lack of programmers who know Cobol, the 40-year-old language in which much of the world's business data is written. Gartner Group reports that 200 billion lines of Cobol code existed as of last year, with an expected growth of 5 billion lines of code per year for the next four years. At the same time, Gartner reports, as of last year there were only 90,000 Cobol programmers in North America, and that number will fall as those programmers retire or pass away. As Gartner reports that Cobol houses 60% of the global code base and 85% of global business data, the decline in programmers could soon present a severe problem to firms in nearly every sector. Complicating matters further, few universities still teach Cobol as part of their computer-science curriculum, and few students seem interested in learning the language. "You can't get the new kids--the dot-commers--to take a second look at Cobol," says Bill Payson, the president of the Senior Staff Job Information Search.
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With Cobol-CGI you directly connect your Web pages to COBOL programs. No need for a Perl interpreter or scripts. No need to rewrite your server programs to be event driven. No need to embed special flags in your HTML forms. Cobol-CGI makes it easy for your COBOL application to communicate directly with the Web.
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Cobol is ... a procedural language in an object-oriented world. While it's well suited to batch operations, the language isn't as good a fit for developing interactive applications or Web-based front ends. And it has a major image problem. Outside of the mainframe data center, Cobol is viewed today by many Java, Visual Basic and C# programmers as an obsolete and inferior language, a vestige from the dark ages of big iron.
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