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Micro Focus Development Suite Increases Compatibility Between COBOL and Windows


Micro Focus, a provider of enterprise modernization solutions, announced it has begun shipping a new release of its combined application development product suite that includes upgrades to its current line of products, including RM/COBOL, Xcentrisity, and the RM/COBOL data tool Relativity.

The combined suite, Liant 12 includes larger capacity and increase efficiency for RM/COBOL identifiers and improved compatibility with Windows, the vendor says. Micro Focus' Liant RM/COBOL product line is a portfolio of integrated tools that enables organizations to maintain a single set of source code while deploying applications on popular open platforms such as Unix and Windows NT. Customers are able to retain the reliability of COBOL while integrating existing applications with more modern technologies.

"The RM/COBOL environment has always been portable to, and highly compatible with Windows environments, providing data file portability, RGB color support, pop-up windows support, Windows print spooler support, and access to system routines," Robert Cavanagh, product manager with the CTO Office of Micro Focus, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "Ongoing maintenance has addressed issues identified on both the Vista, and Windows Server 2008 platforms, improving the compatibility of RM/COBOL with those operating environments."

The new suite also incorporates larger capacity and increased efficiency for RM/COBOL identifiers. "The RM/COBOL compiler and runtime can now compile and execute much larger programs with much more flexibility," Cavanagh explains. "The maximum number of identifiers that can be described in a single program has been increased by more than a factor of 10 (from 65,534 to 840,000). Furthermore, elementary data items in Working-Storage and the Linkage Section are no longer limited to 65,280 characters and the OCCURS clause now allows more than 64K occurrences."

Micro Focus' RM/COBOL data tool Relativity products enable core data from Micro Focus or RM/COBOL applications to be re-tooled as a relational database. Using these products, customers are able to integrate core data into distributed client/server applications.

Micro Focus Xcentrisity allows customers to web-enable existing COBOL-based applications, providing solutions that enable these COBOL applications to interoperate freely and easily with other applications that use the XML standard.

For more information, visit the Micro Focus website.


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