Uladzislau Kalesnikau, Software Developer at IBA Poland and the Zowe IntelliJ Team Lead.  In today’s software development landscape, using Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) for legacy programming languages like COBOL remains crucial. Therefore, it is very important to find new ways to help programmers work with legacy code in a familiar environment. We are excited to announce the Zowe COBOL Language Support Plugin for IntelliJ IDEA, now available on JetBrains Marketplace! This is our very first MVP version 0.0.1, created in cooperation between the Zowe Community and IBA Group ..read more

At Open Mainframe Summit, which took place on September 21-22 virtually and in-person in Philadelphia, PA, Misty Decker, Director of Worldwide Product Marketing, AMC Portfolio at Micro Focus, gave a keynote presentation titled, “Learning COBOL is Much More than just Taking a Class.” After decades in the shadows, understanding COBOL has seen a massive resurgence in recent years, thanks to the Open Mainframe Project.  With a curriculum published and a core of universities now teaching COBOL, what’s the next step? In this keynote session, we’ll use industry research to ask ourselves how ..read more

COBOL Check is a unit testing framework for COBOL created to help COBOL programmers who have difficulties with contemporary development methods such as test driven development. One of the problems with the tooling for the COBOL language  and other mainframe languages currently available is that they do not offer the same levels of granularity for unit testing as opposed to what is available for some of the other languages such as Java and C#. Dave Nicolette, Programmer and Chair of Open Mainframe Project‘s COBOL Check project, explains in this video what COBOL Check is and what ..read more

Written by Ashis Kumar Naik, Odisha University of Technology and Research, Bhubaneswar and Open Mainframe 2023 Summer Mentee Ashis Kumar Naik Hi I am Ashis Kumar Naik , currently a pre-final year computer science student from India. I am an open source enthusiast actively involved in open source communities related to cloud-native technologies, VLC Media Player (for mac), Lance db etc. This summer (June – August 2023) I contributed to the Open Mainframe Project’s COBOL Programming Course where I have integrated the usage of COBOL Check (an open source unit testing framework for COBOL) as a c ..read more

March is Women’s History Month, so we invited Open Mainframe Project community leaders and contributors to share their personal stories. Sudharsana Srinivasan is the Co-Chair of the COBOL Programming Course, a member of the Open Mainframe Project Technical Steering Committee and an IBM Z Influencer Program Manager at IBM. This blog details her academic and professional journey with COBOL and how she changed a missed opportunity into a passion that she shares with others each day.  As I sit here today and reflect on my journey to becoming ‘COBOL Queen’ I cannot but help think about how it ..read more

Launched in April 2020, Open Mainframe Project’s COBOL Programming Course has become one of its most popular projects focused on engaging the next generation of COBOLers – students, developers, lifelong learners and just about anyone who is curious & ready to learn. The course leverages tooling such as Visual Studio Code, Z Open Editor, Code4z and Zowe with a goal to have content that ensured learners stayed focused on learning COBOL. The mission of the course includes: Attract next generation of learners to add COBOL to their tech toolkit Improve the learning experience with the mod ..read more

The post Blast From the Past: The Future of COBOL – The Open Mainframe Ep. 17 appeared first on Open Mainframe Project ..read more

Bankdata is one of the largest specialist IT services providers of Denmark that provides core services (both front-end and back-end) to banks. Bankdata leverages several Open Mainframe Project technologies to power these services. When asked about the importance of the mainframe in the modern world, Rune Christensen, Lead Software Developer at Bankdata, says, “The mainframe is definitely powering the modern economy. At the moment, by far, most of our software runs on a mainframe with the CICS transaction-based services, both REST and SOAP services.” Christensen specifically talks about Open Ma ..read more

Make your mark with important COBOL market research.  The Open Mainframe Project COBOL Working Group recently announced plans to embark on its most ambitious market survey to date. We seek your support and investment to bring this exciting project – and significant brand opportunity – to fruition. About the Research This new research is a collaboration between the COBOL Working Group, the Linux Foundation Research and the Linux Foundation Training and Certification. This project seeks to achieve a detailed understanding of the extent to which vendor investments in COBOL have continued, e ..read more

The COBOL Working Group, which launched in 2020 as a response to the increasing interest in COBOL and the misinformation of it, aims to promote and support the continued use of the COBOL language globally. One of its first missions is to identify the COBOL market, challenges, concerns and how companies are addressing these issues.  Thorough research, the working group uncovered that COBOL is a proven staple with hundreds of billions of lines of production code used across many industries. This year, the COBOL Working Group is ready to get more details on a more global scale. Today at th ..read more