Legacy modernisation vendor Micro Focus has announced COBOL for Eclipse, expanding versions of the Net Express and Server Express platforms to the Eclipse open source ecosystem.
The new launch offers enterprises an integrated development environment across multiple platforms, enabling increased agility and productivity as well as savings of up to 40% of development costs.
The offering aims to enable users to create the same development environment across Windows, Linux and UNIX. It is said this will mean users can switch between languages and platforms and continue to use the tools they are familiar with.
Stuart McGill, CTO at Micro Focus, said: “The release of COBOL for Eclipse is an important step for Micro Focus as we look to provide our customers with the tools needed to develop applications across any environment.”
“Enterprises today are putting a premium on cutting costs and increasing flexibility, and we’re responding by helping developers improve productivity with support for the leading cross-platform integrated development environment. Eclipse is the de facto standard Java development environment, and it is critical that developers in this ecosystem have access to tools enabling them to create the COBOL-based applications at the heart of their business.”
Micro Focus says that one of the main benefits of enabling companies to develop tools across multiple environments will be the ability to move applications to a SOA or cloud computing architecture without having to go through costly and time-consuming code re-writes.
McGill said: “Across the enterprise, COBOL houses mission-critical business logic that must be captured as applications are developed and modernised. As infrastructures evolve and we start seeing more and more applications built as Web services, as part of a service oriented architecture or on the cloud, flexibility becomes paramount.”
“These tools enable developers using the world’s most popular cross-platform IDE to take advantage of COBOL tools, helping them create a solid foundation for contemporary applications and services.”
