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

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 4/18/2022 4:23 AM, Jan-Erik Söderholm wrote:
> Den 2022-04-17 kl. 19:00, skrev Arne Vajhøj:
>> On 4/17/2022 4:45 AM, Jan-Erik Söderholm wrote:
>>> Den 2022-04-17 kl. 02:26, skrev Arne Vajhøj:
>>>> On 4/16/2022 6:54 PM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>>>>> On 4/16/22 18:09, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>>>>> On 4/16/2022 7:28 AM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>>>>>>> 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.
>>>>
>>>> That sounds pretty easy.
>>>>
>>>> But if we assume RESTful web services which are by far the
>>>> most common today.
>>>>
>>>> 1) How does CICS know the right URL to assign to a resource?
>>>> 2) How does CICS know whether to use path or query URL?
>>>> 3) How does CICS know whether to do XML or JSON or both?
>>>> 4) How does CICS know whether to do CORS?
>>>>
>>>
>>> You use CWS. Google "cics web service". CWS gives access
>>> to the usual tools used in web services programming.
>>>
>>> I did CICS/Cobol/DB2 development including CWS approx.
>>> 20 years ago. At that time to build common web pages but
>>> it seems to have evolved to include other functionallity.
>>
>> I get that there is a web server.
>>
>> I get that there are some Cobol code doing something.
>>
>> What I don't get is how the web server end up exposing the
>> right API.
>>
>> I know how ones does it in Java and C# - using annotations/attributes
>> in the application code to define it.
> 
> A lot of that is done outside of the application code. It is
> configurations in the web parts in CWS. I'm not really sure there,
> someone else did the web related parts and we (the Cobol guys) was
> given some functions to call for the web releated parts. Or descriptions
> on how our code was going to be called by the CWS for the "web services".

My point is that somehow the application code need to describe the
web service to be exposed.

For a RESTful web service the mapping of URL's to methods/functions,
whether to consume/produce XML or JSON or both, mapping of data
structure to specific XML/JSON formats. If supporting browsers
also the CORS handling.

A SOAP contract first web service will also require mapping.

A SOAP code first web service may require relative little mapping. But
a language without reflection support will need the source code to
be present.

>> I have seen examples of how it is done in PHP and Python - setting up
>> callbacks.
>>
>> I cannot see how that CICS web server can figure that out with
>> no code changes.
> 
> No code changes in what code? There was no code to change. This
> was new web-enabled code. What do you mean with a "code change"?
 >
> Well, the Cobol code calls the APis that CWS provides, of course.

I was referring to this by Bill:

"COBOL does CICS and CICS does the web.  No extra code required."

If the Cobol code make calls that hook it into the web server then
it is a totally different story.

Arne