| Frank Swarbrick 2006-04-28, 6:55 pm |
| Pete Dashwood<dashwood@enternet.co.nz> 04/28/06 8:06 AM >>>
>
>"Frank Swarbrick" <Frank.Swarbrick@efirstbank.com> wrote in message
>news:4bc8avF10basaU1@individual.net...
>
>Could be. Depends on the circumstances. If you have no COBOL Programmers in
>house and everything else is in Java, your expertise is in Java, why would
>you NOT convert it (as a low priority, background type task...)?
>
>What if your COBOL vendor goes broke or withdraws support for it? You'd
>need to convert to SOMETHING. (This would be a raised priority as soon as
>the existing program crashed or required maintenance.)
>
>So, yes, without being facetious (and I was being :-)) I can see some
>scenarios where it would make sense to convert even batch processing to
>Java.
>
>
>Again, depends on the circumstances. A package? A 4GL? VB? C#? who
knows...
But would these other languages and environments perform as well, or near
enough, as COBOL on a mainframe? Let's say we take our 30000+ line demand
(checking) account posting program that runs once a day to post the day's
transactions, accrue interest, assess fees, creates statement records for
those accounts cycling today, etc. Let's say there are 400,000 accounts and
1,000,000 transactions. We can process that right now in about 20 minutes.
Let's say we want to "convert" that process to Java. We have the overheard
of the JVM and the fact that Java does not have a native decimal type (you
either use floating-point, which I believe is a no-no in financial
calculations, or you use BigDecimal which is a class, not a native type.)
Just based on those two factors, what type of performance might we expect
compared to COBOL? Of course neither of us knows, but I imagine it might be
several orders of magnitude more for Java. Maybe I'm wrong. That's just my
impression from things I've read and from using Java here and there.
Not to defend COBOL in and of itself. It's just I simply don't know of any
other language that is better suited for financial applications. I would
love to have a language that has all of the strengths of COBOL but also all
of the strengths of other more modern languages.
Frank
---
Frank Swarbrick
Senior Developer/Analyst - Mainframe Applications
FirstBank Data Corporation - Lakewood, CO USA
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