I recently had the opportunity to take a look at the newest member of our BRMS family, ILOG Rules for COBOL. We’ve supported JRules running on zSeries (both zOS and zLinux) for a few years now, but there is still an enormous number of legacy COBOL applications and it is not always easy to convince the zSeries administrators to install and configure a Java VM for efficient execution. To compound matters the last time I looked, invoking Java from a COBOL batch application was not trivial either. Throw in a teaspoon of Java vs. COBOL internal company politics and season with Java pricing differences, zAAP hardware/pricing acceleration, and Rules for COBOL becomes a compelling solution for a significant number of the Global 2000.

The workflow is pretty straightforward:

1. Import COBOL Copybook into Rule Studio for Java
2. Generate a BOM and Vocabulary from the Copybook data structures
3. Author rules as usual
4. Rather than exporting a ruleset archive, generate COBOL sub-programs (source code) from the rules, either from Rule Studio or from Rule Team Server
5. Include the generated sub-programs into the target master COBOL program and deploy the code to the mainframe

The advantage with this approach is that enterprises can divide-and-conquer their legacy modernization, incrementally externalizing their business rules from COBOL applications and moving them into the BRMS. They can continue to execute the rules as COBOL minimizing the disruption to their system infrastructure. They may also deploy the same rules to JRules, for re-use in other applications running outside the mainframe, and because the BRMS is the system of record for the business rules consistency is guaranteed.

If you are embarking on an SOA legacy modernization project I encourage you to look at the Transparent Decision Service support in JRules and Rules for COBOL. In my opinion the two are very complimentary as they allow you to “think big” while still “starting small” and avoid rip-and-replace, often associated with project failure in large scale legacy modernization projects.

Posted by Daniel Selman in Rules for COBOL. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.