Veryant has announced a new software release to help organizations lower operational costs by modernizing COBOL assets. This latest version of Veryant’s isCOBOL Application Platform Suite (APS) simplifies COBOL and Java integration, enhances the Eclipse-based development environment, and includes several improvements to make moving to isCOBOL from alternative platforms even easier.

“Many businesses rely on a combination of language environments and want greater value from their existing COBOL investments,” said Alfredo Iglesias, vice president of Veryant. “Our newest release makes it easy to expose core applications and data to SOA, Web Services, and other initiatives without sacrificing functionality, retraining staff, or adding complexity.”

Organizations have reduced licensing costs by as much as 80 percent and gained important business benefits by moving to Veryant. Ron Turley Associates (RTA), a pacesetter in fleet management solutions, chose Veryant’s technology to protect its COBOL application investments, enhance graphical user interfaces, and expand into new markets.

“Veryant’s isCOBOL technology opens new markets for us because of its pure Java deployment model and the foreign language localization capabilities,” said Larry Turley, president of RTA. “It makes us more competitive and will help expand our business.”

isCOBOL APS blends the optimized, business-oriented nature of COBOL with the openness, portability, and power of the Java platform. With isCOBOL 2009, COBOL programmers can automatically generate Java classes that enable Java programs to directly access COBOL data without proprietary middleware or time-consuming, risky reengineering. This feature enhances productivity and eases integration between legacy and new application environments.

The isCOBOL Runtime Environment is 100 percent Java, so COBOL applications can be deployed across multiple platforms using a single code base. The same flexibility is delivered with isCOBOL’s Eclipse-based integrated development environment (IDE). Users can leverage one development environment across multiple platforms, including Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and UNIX and switch between development projects when integrating COBOL with programming languages such as Java.

An import facility has been added to the isCOBOL IDE that allows existing projects and programs from alternative environments such as AcuBench to be automatically brought into the flexible Eclipse framework. Other IDE enhancements such as the addition of a GUI screen designer and an integrated event editor further simplify transitions to Veryant and enhance developer productivity.

The isCOBOL 2009 release offers many other new features and enhancements, including:

• The addition of Javadoc style comments in COBOL source code, enabling the automatic generation of documentation from isCOBOL programs.
• Full support for MySQL, DB2, and DB2/400 (the AS/400 version of DB2 from IBM), to include functionality such as record locking, optimization, and other database-specific features.
• Tighter integration between isCOBOL Server and isCOBOL ISAM Server. By eliminating the need to start a separate isCOBOL ISAM Server process during execution, thin client deployment performance is enhanced.