Marwane El Kharbili

Apr 2, 2008

Business rules, COBOL and Mainframes

Ilog have announced their new Cobol Add-On for Jrules, on the 19.02.2008. I read 2 posts about this here and here too. It should simplify SOA governance for legacy systems. It is destined to be used with legacy systems and in particular mainframe systems upon which applications are coded in COBOL. No need to say that finding programmers which still have much experience in COBOL is no easy task, and maintaining these applications is getting harder. But for companies that have invested much in these mainframe systems, the question of leaving these systems behind doesn't even pose itself. using the COBOL add-on for JRules is a way of outsourcing the business Rules embedded in theses mainframes to manage them. This also allows an SOA integration of these systems by invoking COBOL code through the business rules. COBOL code can also be generated from business rules. So quite an interesting application of business rules to legacy systems. I had heard a webcast by the guys from Corticon about how to realize such a legacy modernization and they were tackling the same topic. So it looks like business rules management system providers see this field of legacy systems as a very important one to their expansion strategy.

Marwane El Kharbili.

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