Cobol in .NET with Otterkit
InfoWorld | at | by Mike
As much as enterprise IT evolves, we’re left running old hardware and software for many reasons. Perhaps there’s a regulatory requirement to keep data for as long as possible; perhaps there’s a dependency on code that remains reliable and supported even after decades. Whatever the reason, we may need to work with that system and that data as part of a newer platform.One platform that’s not going away is the mainframe, especially in government and finance. A lot of critical data and software runs on those systems, and they’re not as outdated as we might think, running hypervisors and multiple operating systems—including up-to-date Linux distributions.We now have a lot of options for building applications that work with those legacy systems, including technologies like the latest .NET releases. We’re not limited to the familiar .NET languages either, as the underlying runtime and compilers are accessible by a mix of commercial and open source language implementations, including some designed for working with mainframe data.