New Micro Focus Tool Converts COBOL into Components

Rick Grehan

I am now convinced that my great-grandchildren, should they choose to become programmers, will at least encounter -- and may possibly use -- some recognizable descendant of COBOL. Micro Focus ((800) 872-6265 or (415) 856-4161, or contact http://www.mfltd.co.uk/win95.html on the Internet) has helped ensure COBOL's long life with its new Visual Object COBOL for Windows 95 . This $499 product brings interesting OLE Automation capabilities to legacy COBOL code. From one who does most of his work in C and C++: I am impressed.

I've already written about ANSI's efforts to bring about an object-oriented COB OL (see "Object-Oriented COBOL," September 1994 BYTE). Micro Focus's object COBOL is a "snapshot" of the draft standard, which is not slated for adoption until 1997. With Visual Object COBOL, Micro Focus has inserted its object COBOL compiler into an integrated development environment. And its IDE looks as robust as many I've seen elsewhere.

One intriguing capability of this product is its support for OLE Automation. You can use Visual Object COBOL to write a program that can control other programs with OLE Automation server capabilities (e.g., Excel). More intriguing: You can use Visual Object COBOL to convert COBOL programs into OLE Automation servers. This means you can bring business logic that's currently written in COBOL into the new world of OLE and componentware.

Visual Object COBOL for Windows 95 will produce 32-bit executables. It can also generate multithreaded applications. Objects within Visual Object COBOL support inheritance (albeit single inheritance), polymorphism, and late bind ing.

When I first considered that last fact, I guessed that Object COBOL used late binding only because the syntactical changes necessary for early-binding support would be horrendous. However, Gary Crook, Visual Object COBOL's project development manager, pointed out that late binding is actually an advantage with large-scale development projects. If you make an alteration to an object's method that's early-bound, it's likely you'll have to recompile the entire application. With late-bound methods, you need only recompile the module that's been altered.

Visual Object COBOL arrives with an extensive class library that supports (among other things) all the significant Windows GUI objects: dialog boxes, push buttons, scroll bars, and other controls. What's missing (and what I anticipate in an upcoming release) is a visual builder extension to the IDE that lets you drag and drop your controls into place and automatically backfills your project files with COBOL source code (à la Visual Basic) .

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Micro Focus Has Broad View

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Micro Focus's Visual Object COBOL includes an integrated development environment that includes a class browser and an editor.