Cobol Schmobol: HyperText Mark-up Language is where the future lies appears to be the watchword from Micro Focus Plc. The company has decided to turn itself into a World Wide Web-based company, and is building all its mainframe-offloading products and the client-server target systems on Web technologies. And it will use the results in its own business as well as pushing it to customers. It calls its internal Web-based systems Enterprise Webs and says it has already begun to use some case study applications, aims to deploy them fully over the next few months and take them to market shortly thereafter as companions to its new generation of rapid application development tools, which will support programming in HTML and SQL as well as Cobol, with video and audio conferencing added.
