It seems likely that the reason IBM is cosying up to Micro Focus Plc (CI No 1,651) with AD/Cycle marketing agreements and so on is that IBM has a beady eye on Object Cobol – it wants a piece of what is going to be a very lucrative market in offering ways to re-use all those Cobol programs that are sitting on its mainframes. So far C++ has dominated the object-oriented world to the extent that it is currently the de facto standard language. Meanwhile, IBM has been using SmallTalk for internal development and has set up marketing agreements to distribute third-party SmallTalk products. One of the drawbacks of SmallTalk is that it requires lots of memory and processing power, but one of its positive attributes is that it shares some syntactic similarities with Cobol. With the announcement that Micro Focus has signed an agreement with Digitalk to enable it to integrate SmallTalk/V PM into the Cobol/2 Workbench (CI No 1,652), IBM’s long-term strategy looks clearer. Micro Focus has developed an interface that will enable SmallTalk applications to exchange data and messages with Cobol applications. The SmallTalk option enables Cobol/2 users to play with the object-oriented paradigm – and adds an attraction to developing applications that use Presentation Manager. However, in the long term Object Cobol looks as if it will be part of AD/Cycle via the Cobol/2 Workbench, especially now that Micro Focus is providing a bridge between SmallTalk and Cobol. The Object Oriented Option for the Cobol/2 Workbench costs $1,500. However, the Micro Focus crusade to expand Cobol’s presence in a market considering downsizing has not stopped there. It has now launched a Windows Enabling Kit so that Cobol developers can write applications to run under Windows 3.0 and can migrate existing Cobol applications over to use Windows memory management and windowing capabilities by relinking run-time libraries with new libraries provided in the Windowing kit. This product is shipping now, but Micro Focus is already busy developing its Panels 2 environment independent development facility so that it supports Windows. This will mean that Panels 2 programmers will be able to write a generic interface so that their Cobol programs can run unchanged in a Windows or Presentation Manager environment under MS-DOS or OS/2.
