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

[Jan-Erik Söderholm]

Den 2022-04-18 kl. 14:17, skrev 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
> 

No idea what Bill wrote about. We used CWS, which is not a full blown
"web server", as I understand. It just gives the services needed for
CICS applications to respond to requests comming "from the web".

I might wery well be that Bill used CWS without knowing it.

And note this didn't use SOAP/XML/JSON or such, just usual GET/POST
HTTP calls from browsers. And CWS presented the CGI data to the
Cobol applications. Worked just fine. But it was 15-20 years ago.



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