Well met,

OpenCOBOL continues to grow. The pre-release is under active development, some very nice documentation is growing, and of particular interest is the quantity and quality of the technical discussions on opencobol.org. The C patch files are an indication that more and more people are coming to grips with the source code for the compiler.

In my humble opinion, this bodes well, it bodes well indeed.

Cheers,
Brian

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Well met

On writing code for others

Is it right to push one's own personal preferences on others? When taking on an open systems project, be it code, documentation, translation, cheerleading ... it is hard not to have personal opinion and bias influence the work.

Is that bad? Is it one of the prices paid for open freedoms?

I'll opine that it isn't perfect, but it's a price worth paying. I'll pay, and gladly accept the views of the world foistered on us by the bright and industrious developers willing to share their works and ask for little in return beyond that those works are found useful.

Cheers

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Well met

50 Years in

We quickly approach 50 years of the COBOL brand. September 18th, 50 years ago, the name COBOL was announced.

And the new kid on the block

And 50 years later, OpenCOBOL 1.0 just passed it's first birthday.

What's next?

Lots. Lots and lots. Plans are afoot for a full blown customization of GNAT Programming Studio for OpenCOBOL project support. Vala is becoming a nice extension writing layer. The GPS IDE customizations support this new GObject programming language as well.

Documentation is still on the hot plate. OpenCOBOL deserves good documentation, and will get it.

A short muse it seems.
Cheers,
Brian

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Recent builds of the OpenCOBOL 1.1 pre-release now pass over 9000 of the NIST COBOL-85 standard tests.

See open-cobol-1.1/tests/cobol85/README for instructions on retrieving the test suite, then from open-cobol-1.1/tests/cobol85 execute

make test

Cheers,
Brian

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Well met,

Economics

As we traverse difficult economic times, some difficult decisions need to be made. Using OpenCOBOL should not be one of them.

The potential economic benefits of OpenCOBOL are undeniable. This freely available, robust COBOL compiler can offer savings. Savings now with a fee free development system, and, as a complete and very agile environment, savings into the future.

Business

COBOL has a proven track record managing business data and business logic. 50 years on and COBOL is still at the heart of many business applications. Some may opine that better days lie ahead by chasing the newest technologies. Gambling, pure and simple. COBOL is not a gamble. COBOL is proven. OpenCOBOL offers the safety net and business level reliability of COBOL development without the fees and with all the freedoms.

Look into it

http://opencobol.org All it will cost is a download and a few minutes of installation and you can see for yourself.

Cheers

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Well met,

A good thing

With the comprehensive underpinnings of COBOL support with OpenCOBOL, and the multi-language programming potential of the OpenCOBOL 1.1 pre-release; OpenCOBOL means business.

A grand thing

All sorts of business.

A seriously fun thing

Agile as well as comprehensive, free and open COBOL programming is upon us.

Spoilt for choice

OpenCOBOL has an excellent run time link loader, and great compile time support for pure and mixed language modular programming. This feature has exposed a vast potential for linked library extensions.

An OpenCOBOL developer can write pure standard COBOL, or can mix in a little C and get to Ada, or link to libCURL and access internet resources. Access a SQLite engine that emulates the sqlite3> shell prompt. Straight up OpenCOBOL can be used for CGI. There is a database abstraction toolkit that can access MySQL, pgSQL, FireBird

Along with the precise vertical power of compiled COBOL, OpenCOBOL now has access to a nice number of different scripting support tools. OC can get an assist from a little SpiderMonkey javascript core and a quick regular expression string substitution. Or perhaps a little Lua and a quick table manipulation in a few lines. Command control with a Regina Rexx layer. Tool Command Language and Tool Kit with embedded Tcl/Tk.
Perl is only a few calls away.

All of the above in a single app, or just that one, to make that concise little data manipulation in a quick line of favourite script.

An attempt at documentation

ReStructuredText is used for the FAQ. The ocdoc utility can extract documentation and pass it thru docutil rst commands. In source documentation and OpenCOBOL look good together.

Come on in, the water is fine

According to this advocate, the OpenCOBOL 1.1 pre-release is worth looking into.

Information leaps and grows here on add1tocobol.com as we get used to TikiWiki, and more can be found at opencobol.org.

Cheers,
Brian

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Well met,

The system that will be discussed here is OpenCOBOL. OpenCOBOL can be found at opencobol.org.

A Frequently Asked Question file can be viewed by clicking to OpenCOBOL FAQ

The system

OpenCOBOL is an Open Source implementation of COBOL. Striving to meet the COBOL-85 standard, it also includes extensions from COBOL-2002 and the draft COBOL-2008. A very complete COBOL compiler. OpenCOBOL 1.0 was released in December 2007, but the 1.1 pre-release is the version that is getting most of the attention. Always current OC1.1 source archive

Community extensions

Through discussions on opencobol.org the OpenCOBOL developer community have now written layers for

Utility	Description
Rexx	Regina Rexx high level embedding by command string and file
cobcurses	A very complete curses based screen designer package
libCURL	Limited wrapper and working example that fetches most recent tarball
POSIX Message Queues	Wrapper with callback to COBOL entry point on MQNOTIFY
SpiderMonkey javascript	High level embedding with alphanumeric field return
Lua	High level embedding with alphanumeric get from Lua stack
Perl	cob_perl embedding, supporting many data clauses
libDBI	Database abstraction exposing MySQL, Postgres, SQLite, FireBird
SQLite3	Clone of sqlite3> shell with result row callback
Tcl/Tk	Embedded tcl_interp, values passed to and from with Tcl helper
gnuplot	External scripting example
Vim syntax highlighter	All OC reserved words
KATE syntax highlighter	Total hack with many remnants of Fortran original
GeSHi syntax highlighter	Modified version of cobol.php for OpenCOBOL

Documentation

There is now this TikiWiki site being built with a growing number of File Galleries, Articles, Blogs, Forums, ..., well Tiki does many things

There is also the FAQ, which is more than a FAQ and less than a FAQ.

How-To

There is a growing number of example OpenCOBOL programs being posted to the opencobol.org forums and this TikiWiki site.

Sorting, Screens, Allocation, In source ReST documentation extractor, OpenCOBOL features of all kinds.

IRC

There is an active IRC channel on Freenode, #add1tocobol. Clicking to #add1tocobol on freenode will open a chat frame, right here on site.

More to come

OpenCOBOL is a quality COBOL system, improving and increasing in potential every week.

Cheers,
Brian

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