Grevink and other Cobol-integration fans like the idea of software as a service just fine -- it's just that they don't see Web services as offering anything more than souped-up interface technology, or in his words "what CORBA or COM did".
The WRQ approach is exemplified in a recent engagement with UK-Canadian tourism specialist Airline Seat Company, which offers services under the 'Canadian Affair' brand. It used integration technology from WRQ to deliver a new e-commerce application that links to essential back-end data and reservation systems. Its UK IT manager Thibault Baradat-Bujoli notes that: "Our problem was the ease of accessing the availabilities of our charter and scheduled flights stored in our back-office proprietary database through the customer Web site."
Two solutions presented themselves: "Either buy the set of APIs from the provider of our back office system which would allow us to do part of this task, or buy a solution which can emulate an operator. We finally choose an integration solution because it was secure and we didn't want to change our legacy systems."
Using the WRQ Verastream integration approach, the company can now link its terminal-based host applications in such a way they can dynamically exchange information with the Web, ERP or CRM applications. Other advantages of this way of doing integration have been ease of changing the Web site's functionality, Baradat-Bujoli adds.
The takeaway thought is that integration doesn’t have to be as expensive or painful as is sometimes presented -- and that there are at least a few technologies that seem to be able to help map the successful old onto the exciting Web-shaped new.
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.