Integration -- the connecting of applications, and custom-built software in order to support new or existing business processes -- is doable in any number of ways: just take a look through some of the stories in the Integration channel.
This is probably going to be of particular comfort to the large class of companies that still have (whisper it) Cobol at the heart of their operations. Yes, despite the combined best efforts of both the Unix and Microsoft communities these past 20 years, the COmmon Business Oriented Language is still (at least in legacy form) still with us, and even more surprisingly, providing value for many a system yet. And you thought we'd exterminated all this stuff with Y2K.
Joking aside, the vast amount of heritage system functionality in the world means that there has to be a way to leverage it to give new applications connections to the back end. IDC acknowledges this in a December 2003 white paper on various approaches to integration: "Most organisations believe the primary impetus for integration is to be able to adapt to changing business requirements. Thus we've matured from the concept of integration as pulling in information to map from one location to another, to the concept of addressing processes and change via integrated systems. This requires an organisation to think of its integration solution as a flexible entity, and preferably not so tightly coupled to discrete applications. "
This is the environment non-EAI (enterprise application integration) specialists like WRQ and Micro Focus are working in. They say that the secret to integration isn't necessarily to buy a dedicated integration platform: instead, they support techniques like wrapping and componentisation, which allow Cobol system functionality to get reborn into a more open and cross-application oriented world.
Micro Focus is a survivor of a few turns round the track, and now an independent private VC-backed firm of some 400+ employees. UK director of product strategy, Mike Gilbert, says that his customers face two choices in integration: buy a platform from a company like Tibco or Vitria to act as a central hub for all apps, or use his company's products to bridge mainframe software to the new world, an approach he says Gartner sums up as 'programmatic integration'.
Talkback
After seeing the huge amount of Java Junk that's accumulating out there, I'm not so inclined to be snotty about COBOL any more.
COBOL code has stayed around because it's possible to write reasonably good code without a genius IQ (read: COBOL programmers are cheap). Frankly, Java claims the same, but with less satisfactory results. Since COBOL is now OO and has HTTP extensions (amongst other goodies), what say we throw Java back where it came from and use COBOL as the lingua franca of business coding instead?
It's not really about the technology so much as who's behind the technology and pushing it forward. MSoft is big and pushing their .NET solutions, so as long as they keep doing that, it will have a presence and continue to evolve.
IBM, Oracle, Sun, and other heavy hitters are pushing Java, so it's going to continue to be adopted and continue to evolve too.
The new COBOL and all of the extensions may be the greatest thing ever, but without an 800-pound corporate gorilla to champion it, market it, and generally beat the drum, it simply won't fly.
Plus, you may want to think about if the new plugins are really innovations, or is it just COBOL playing catch-up. It's one thing to bolt on OO and HTTP/socket awareness to a language, but that doesn't make it immediately desirable to use.