CodeTurn COBOL to Java

The Astadia COBOL to Java Solution

Many of today’s applications that were developed in COBOL are still mission-critical and continue to deliver significant benefits to the organizations that use and rely upon them. Nevertheless, many organizations are faced with issues of Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), skills shortage, or end of support. Astadia’s service provides an opportunity to liberate these valuable and reliable business systems from their dependency on legacy technology and converts them to Object-Oriented languages such as Java or C#.

Astadia will take any application developed in COBOL and automatically transform it to a functionally identical one, ready to run on any platform supporting the JVM. Since both the conversion and the testing is fully automated, the outcome of the project is fully predictable, in terms of risks, costs, and duration.

Three Strong Promises

All Astadia transformation solutions ensure three types of equivalence:

Functional equivalence: the converted application’s behavior is identical to that of the original one

Performance equivalence: the converted application will perform as well as the original one

Maintenance equivalence: maintenance of the converted application will be comparable in effort to the original application.

Why Migrate from COBOL to Java?

There are many good reasons to move from COBOL to Java. These are typically the major concerns for businesses:

• High (and rising) maintenance and runtime fees for the existing COBOL products
• Shrinking availability of COBOL developers and lack of interest in COBOL from young developers
• End-of-life scenarios for certain COBOL technologies
• Lack of application extensibility and interoperability with other, non-COBOL applications

Java offers answers to all these concerns:

• Support fees are negligible or even non-existing
• It is one of the most widely-used programming languages today and actively being developed
• Its interoperability and portability are unsurpassed when compared to other technologies

Next to that, a COBOL to Java transformation also means:

• Enabling the use of state-of-the-art IDEs, with extensive debugging, refactoring, profiling and (unit)testing support
• Enabling the use of thousands of third-party libraries, covering almost all imaginable computing needs

CodeTurn for COBOL to Java Transformation

Astadia uses its own specialized tools to automate the conversion of COBOL sources to Java, guaranteeing code quality, avoiding risks, and offering full predictability by 100% automation. The architecture of the COBOL to Java converter contains:

• A parser that support many COBOL dialect syntax, and embedded languages (e.g. EXEC CICS or EXEC SQL)
• A resolver that computes detailed control-flow and data-usage information
• Conversion rules for all COBOL syntax, from single statements to complex patterns of code
• A code generator for Java enabling any desired coding style

Key Traits of Astadia’s Conversion Tool

• Handles all COBOL data types with 100% fidelity
• Handles also complex GO TO and PERFORM/fallthrough based control-flow
• Handles POINTER, BASED and ADDRESS OF
• Favors simple mappings when possible while having fallback mappings when needed
• Has clean mappings for most COPY and many COPY…REPLACING directives
• Resulting code takes maximal advantage of modern IDEs refactoring possibilities so further changes can be done in an incremental and type-safe way
• Resulting code can be tuned to be more OO-style or more procedural style
• Offers many out-of-the-box customization possibilities
• A plugin-based architecture making it easy to create project-specific conversion rules
• Enables modernization of UI (e.g. using web-based or Swing UI) and data storage (using any RDBMS instead of ISAM/VSAM)
• Built to take advantage of massive parallelization resulting in even the biggest source code sets (with tens of millions of LOC) being converted in a matter of hours

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Additional Resources

COBOL Migrations

CodeTurn COBOL to Java Fact Sheet

CodeTurn COBOL to C# Fact Sheet

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Visit our Case Studies to see how we use automation to help organizations accelerate digital transformation.

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