[Info-vax] First ship poll: When will the first native x86-64 compilers ship ?

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 4/16/22 18:09, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 4/16/2022 7:28 AM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>> On 4/15/22 22:10, Dave Froble wrote:
>>> On 4/15/2022 7:25 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>>> On 4/15/2022 7:17 PM, Richard Maher wrote:
>>>>> On 15/04/2022 8:44 pm, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>>>>> On 4/15/2022 3:36 AM, Richard Maher wrote:
>>>>>>> Something like Kestrel that talks HTTP and can pass JSON to 3GL
>>>>>>> code a la mode de TIER3. FIDO2 Authentication support.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Both Java and Python can provide nice embedded HTTP servers, do 
>>>>>> JSON and
>>>>>> potentially interact with native code (Cobol or otherwise), but 
>>>>>> obvious
>>>>>> question is whether it wouldn't be better to do it all in either 
>>>>>> Java or Python.
>>>>>
>>>>> This is the biggest mistake VMS has made for 20 years; throw away 
>>>>> the existing
>>>>> customer base :-(
>>>>
>>>> Using the right tool for the job is hardly throwing away the
>>>> customer base.
>>>>
>>>> Cobol, Basic, Pascal, C etc. is just not the optimal language
>>>> for writing a new web service.
>>>>
>>>> Not on any platform.
>>>
>>> Really depends on the web service, doesn't it?
>>
>> Like maybe, IBM zSystem running COBOL with CICS and a DB2 backend.
> 
> I don't see that combo as special.
> 
> CGI scripts in Cobol or PL/I would require the developers
> to write maybe 10 times as much code and the result would
> perform really bad.
> 
> Java or Python frontend calling C wrapper calling Cobol
> or PL/I code may be doable, but comes with a lot of risks
> due to potentially incompatible threading/transactional/whatever
> models.

Why would you need all of that?  COBOL does CICS and CICS does
the web.  No extra code required.

> 
> Neither seems attractive to me.
> 
> Doing it all in Java is possible (Java on z works
> with CICS and DB2). Maybe it is also possible to do
> it all in Python (Python does support DB2 but I don't
> know about CICS - and I would probably prefer Java over
> Python for such code anyway).
> 
> If the use case allows for async updates then it would
> be easy to have Java or Python read directly from DB2
> but send all updates to IBM MQ and have some regular
> Cobol or PL/I code handle the actual update (there are
> most likely existing code there that can be reused).
> 

IBM COBOL does Embedded CICS just like Embedded SQL.
It can all be done without any of the wrappers people
seem so enthralled with.

As for the non-IBM side.  I have done a number of proof of
concept COBOL <-> WEB systems back in my academia days.
It's actually easier than PHP. Cleaner than PHP.  Easier to
understand than PHP.  And definitely more secure than PHP.

bill