Some people say COBOL is dead, it will be replaced by Web 2.0 mashup technologies like Java, C#, VB.net, Javascript, PHP, MySQL, Jasper, Hibernate, Spring, Flash, Media Player, RSS, Ajax, Https, FTP and budding cloud computing. The interactivity of the web interfaces over the internet is evolving the concept of the internet as a cloud of same service provider; an ever increasing sea of computing resources.

When people refer to COBOL, they should not refer to it as just a language. COBOL in the EIS legacy system is commonly composed of the heavily invested technologies like IBM CICS, IMS DB/DC, DB2, IDBMS, JCL, aside from the middleware Micro-focus COBOL. Along with these technologies are the peripheral tools in change management such Changeman, Harvest, IBM ClearQwest, IBM Clearcase, FileAid, scheduling tools like CA7, and the security mechanism like IBM RACF, CA TSS, etc,..

This is why people who say COBOL is dead language is not accurately portraying the underlying trillion of dollars investment in the legacy system. Imagine, according to IDC study, investment in the legacy online system IBM CICS is over 35 years and almost $1 trillion are already invested in Applications. Over $1 trillion transactions are processed each day using COBOL CICS. Over 30 billions of online transaction per day are processed. How about IBM COBOL IMS DB/DC. That is another story.

How are these large investment leveraged in the modern web technolgies. COBOL CICS system will remain to stay as business layer interfacing with the data layer be the IBM DB2 Oracle , MS SQL , etc. The presentation and connectivity middleware technologies are using the web mashups technologies mentioned above.

What are the various ways of web enabliing CICS online legacy system. Some just use plain screen scraper technologies wherein quick development turn around is achieved. The screen scraper technologies acts just like an screen emulator for IBM TSO.

The majority of shops use medium coupled integration technologies. The most commonly used in the industry are using JCA (J2EE Connector Architecture) and IBM WebSphere or MS MQ series for their MQ clients and CICS TS using CICS MQ Trigger Monitor, Message Adapter Channel mechanism. Coming in third is the use of Web Services. Very few are straight users of EJB (Enterprise JavaBeans) interfacing with Entity beans either through Container Managed or Bean Managed Persistence. CICS now support Session Beans in either stateless or stateful mode.