Micro Focus adds Java, Azure to platform list

Stephen Withers
Monday, 24 January 2011 12:06

Business IT - Technology

Micro Focus's COBOL development software can now be used to create code for the Java Virtual Machine or Windows Azure as well as the previously supported platforms.

Micro Focus has been almost synonymous with COBOL for decades. The UK-based company is increasingly concerned with application modernisation and porting to non-traditional architectures.

To this end, Micro Focus COBOL already allows deployment on Windows, Unix, Linux and .NET. The newly released COBOL R3 adds Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and Windows Azure to that list.

Thus one set of developer skills can be used on multiple platforms, and multiple application types can be run on a single deployment platform.

Developers can use either Visual Studio 2010 or Eclipse, and deploy to any of the supported platforms with no platform-specific work, company officials claimed.

The addition of C# and Java-like4 constructs to COBOL R3 make life easier for users coming to it from those languages. (If you think COBOL's dead, Micro Focus claims around five billion lines of new COBOL code are added to live systems every year.)

There's something new for Unix and Linux too - see page 2.