I'm employed at a fairly big company here in Germany and got the job to create the main website for it which will feature:
- Static contents; Information and Presentations
- An employee area (around 6000 employees) featuring various things from calendars, job descriptions, some sort of groups
- Too many other dynamic things I can't list here
I have decided to use COBOL for the job, it may be very underrated but it is a very powerful language, especially for business apps and, as my co-workers say, web (2.0) development too.
I also need to use COBOL because all the backend and transactions system of the company is programmed in it (some small parts were programmed in LISP too, I don't know exactly why). I also have received an API that makes it possible to use COBOL with MySQL easily.
This is a big project and it will probably take more than 2 months programming it.
- What do I have to expect when building a huge web app in COBOL?
- Are there web frameworks for COBOL available? Some sort of MVC?
- Are there any good resources for practical web-development with COBOL?
Thanks in advance
Answer
What do I have to expect when building a huge web app in COBOL?
It will take a long time. Frameworks like Django, Ruby on Rails or CodeIgniter are designed specifically to create web sites in very little time.
Most of these frameworks can build working dynamic content web sites in 20 minutes. COBOL cannot. Unless you can type really quickly, you'll probably have very little workable code in the time you could learn and build a site with any more modern tool.
Are there web frameworks for COBOL available? Some sort of MVC?
Asking this question now indicates that the choice of using COBOL is a really, really bad idea.
The usual strategy is to chose the framework first. After making the framework choice, we endure the language required to leverage that framework.
However, there's always http://www.coboloncogs.org/HOME.HTM
Are there any good resources for practical web-development with COBOL?
Practical web development is done with web-specific frameworks. Any of the dozens of Python web frameworks, Ruby on Rails, any of the PHP frameworks, any of the Java frameworks. They're highly specialized to build web sites quickly and cheaply.
COBOL is not highly specialized for this. Nor (outside the i-Series) does anyone seriously consider COBOL for web development.
Your best hope would be to use as many external libraries as possible and write as little COBOL as possible. You have to make heavy use of the COBOL to C features of OpenCOBOL to work with the C-language API's and -- in effect -- build your site in C with a COBOL wrapper.