Mutton dressed as lamb, new wine in old bottles (that one dates from the days when bottles were made of leather and old ones were prone to burst) it may be, but Visual Cobol is on its way if Computer Associates International Inc gets its way. The company reckons that $2,300,000m has been invested in Cobol development over the past 10 years alone, and cites Gartner Group Inc figures suggesting that 80% of all applications in use are Cobol. Computer Associates of course owns Realia Inc these days, and it’s plan to give all those old Cobol programs a facelift, and that load of old Cobollers something new to learn is CA-Visual Realia – a system for adding graphical front ends to Cobol programs. CA-Visual Realia uses a Windows-based visual programming environment to provide tools for creating and updating new applications, yet retains the full functionality of Cobol. It includes an SQL pre-processor and some 20 Open Data Base Connectivity database drivers to enable applications to process information throughout the enterprise. CA-Visual Realia also offers project management, client-server application development support, a personal database, graphical report writer, version control, configuration manager, forms editor, Cobol Workbench, Cobol analysis, navigation and debugging support and database administration facilities, the Islandia, New York company says. The forms editor creates the graphical user interface without the programmer having to write complex Windows code – the programmer paints in the Windows objects, such as buttons, listboxes, bit-maps and edit fields, and let the forms editor generate the code. Application run-time code can be distributed royalty-free throughout the enterprise. CA-Visual Realia supports Windows 3.1 and is $2,500 a copy. A competitive upgrade is available for any Micro Focus Plc Cobol users who are too impatient to wait for the Newbury firm’s own visual front-end for its Cobol.
