In the face of Gartner figures that show the high cost of turning a Cobol programmer into an object-oriented developer, integration vendors offer a different solution. A better route, they say, is exposing the business processes in legacy applications, keeping the core of the application intact. That approach allows developers to continue to work with whatever language they’re familiar with.
With an estimated 200 billion lines of Cobol code still in use worldwide, the treasure trove of business processes stored in so-called legacy applications is golden—and something that corporations want to find better ways of mining. The growth of SOA is a big factor pushing companies to look at ways to access the business processes buried in mainframe programs, and to do it without rewriting those programs in other languages.
