ReadWriteEnterprise

COBOL, one of the oldest programming languages created, is often thought to be as dead as Latin. Yet, as we reported in October, COBOL remains a consistently in-demand skill for enterprise developers. Why? Maybe because, according to an announcement from application modernization company Micro Focus, there are still 220 billion lines of COBOL code in active use in enterprise applications today. Micro Focus claims that COBOL still powers 70% of the world's businesses.

How do you deal with all that legacy code? One way is to re-write everything. But Micro Focus offers another solution - and no, it's not COBOL on Cogs. MicroFocus offers a tool called Visual COBOL that enables developers to deploy COBOL code to Windows, UNIX, Linux, .NET and Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and the Microsoft Windows Azure. Visual COBOL translates COBOL code directly to the JVM, allowing developers integrate COBOL applications with Java.