Visual COBOL

Future-proof your COBOL Business Applications

The leading COBOL application development, deployment, and modernization solution for distributed systems.

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Visual COBOL

Overview

Visual COBOL® provides COBOL development and integration tools – in your choice of Visual Studio or Eclipse – that offer programmers an unrivaled development experience. Use Visual COBOL to help your AppDev teams work better together and deliver new functionality faster to your business users.

Visual COBOL 4.0 COBOL, Containers and Cloud

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Compile COBOL applications to Java

Compile COBOL applications to Java byte code for deployment within the Java Virtual Machine

Compile COBOL applications to .NET

Use Visual COBOL to compile directly to Microsoft intermediate language for deployment within Microsoft .NET

Fully featured COBOL editor

Also includes an integrated COBOL debug experience

Native code generator

Visual COBOL includes a native code generator for the leading Enterprise platforms, including Windows, Linux on Intel, Linux on Power, Linux on z systems, AIX, Solaris, and HP-UX

Mixed-language support

Integrate COBOL with C/C++, C#, VB.NET, Java, and more

RDBMS support

Visual COBOL includes RDBMS support for Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, and open source databases, including PostgreSQL

Support for virtualized, container, and cloud environments

Visual COBOL supports COBOL deployment to industry-standard frameworks such as Docker, Amazon AWS, and integrated support for the Microsoft Azure SDK

Advanced diagnostics tools

Visual COBOL includes easy-to-use tools including patented reversible debugging aids for RHEL Intel systems

Visual COBOL for Visual Studio provides advanced COBOL editing and debugging for application developers. Continuous background compilation, auto complete, code analysis, and code search are just a few of the many developer tools available to streamline application delivery. Utilize REST and JSON to build new web services. Create new user interfaces using Win Forms or WPF. Combine COBOL with C#, VB, and other .NET languages – all within one IDE.

Visual COBOL for Eclipse provides advanced COBOL editing and debugging for application developers. Continuous background compilation code analysis, code search, and remote compile, and debugging are just a few of the many developer tools available to streamline application delivery. Utilize REST and JSON to build new web services. Create new user interfaces using HTML-5. Combine COBOL with Java and other Java Virtual Machine (JVM) languages – all within one IDE.

The Micro Focus COBOL compiler and runtime system provides universal platform coverage enabling COBOL applications to be deployed across a range of distributed systems, ensuring compatibility and consistent behavior across different platforms. Standard library routines callable from COBOL applications enable a write-once, deploy-anywhere approach for developers. The latest release of Visual COBOL takes this development and deployment flexibility even further with support for Docker containers. New product packaging options enable Docker deployment to both Windows Server and Linux platforms.

Case Studies

Sydex Sports Software

Sydex Sports knocks it out of the park with Visual COBOL

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LV 1871

Visual COBOL delivers a future proof strategy for application modernization and enabling the porting of business services to Java.

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Syspro

Embracing innovation with Visual COBOL® delivers a modern and agile development environment, boosting productivity and performance by 30 percent.

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Upgrading from COBOL Workbench to Visual COBOL for Eclipse was much easier than I had anticipated. I had expected the need to rework code and was reluctant to make the move. However, the risk of continuing to use older technology, as well as the promise of a modern development toolset with mixed language support, convinced us to pursue the upgrade.

Ameritas Life Insurance Corp

It is always our priority to bring together the best in class experience for our application development and management teams. With support for Visual COBOL we have taken our user experience to the next level by providing a well-integrated, seamless development and deployment of COBOL apps to our enterprise-grade platform.

IBM

Thanks to Visual COBOL, we can now use COBOL code more flexibly as microservices, integrated in a service-oriented architecture, to accelerate business processes.

German Pension Fund

Visual COBOL for Eclipse has helped us reduce technical debt and increase flexibility, preparing us for future business challenges. Today, we use, maintain and update fewer tools, helping developers to increase productivity and deliver state-of-the-art services to staff.

LV 1871

The move to Visual COBOL has given us significantly improved graphics and video capabilities; enhanced visualization tools; an online version of the solution, and a much more modern look and feel.

Mike Phillips – PRESIDENT

Sydex Sports Software

We couldn’t believe how quickly everyone picked up on the Visual COBOL potential. Even our Microsoft .NET developers were able to use Visual COBOL within a matter of days as it integrates into their existing development tools. And, the time it takes to on-board new development interns went from many months to just a few weeks.

SYSPRO

We had not appreciated the difference in user interface, but our developers love the new environment. Code debugging and editing is so much easier for them.

New Era Life

We feel there are still many opportunities to be exploited with Visual COBOL, and that is exactly the position we wanted to reach; flexibility and agility to meet any future challenges head-on.

Cooper Farms

We successfully migrated a couple of our applications from aging development and database platforms to a more modern and cost-effective environment using Visual COBOL. The migration effort enabled us to continue to leverage these applications while mitigating risk, managing the TCO of these applications, and modernizing the user interface.

Nationwide Financial

Most organizations today rely on COBOL systems for critical business service delivery but need to innovate faster to address competitive and legislative pressures, meet new customer demands, and enter new markets. By taking the application modernization route, reusing core business systems over other alternatives, companies can take advantage of the latest technology, dramatically reduce development costs, and improve application and organizational performance.

Creative Intellect Consulting

Visual COBOL: A Developer's Guide to Modern COBOL

This new Micro Focus eBook is written for the COBOL, Java and .NET developer. Your mission: Start a new era of innovation powered by modern tools that bridge COBOL systems to the world of Java and .NET

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Visual COBOL: value profile service

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Visual COBOL: The agent of change

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COBOL Academic Program

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