Micro web-framework for COBOL

SNOBOL should be looked at, if for nothing else, for its string handling (add a brief look at Icon right afterwards). I would have killed to take APL in college, but despite having to program on an IBM 370 mainframe, no classes were offered. I'm still a little ticked.

I've been interested in getting into this market. Can you point me to these jobs?

4.2:

The Master was explaining the nature of Tao to one of his novices.

"The Tao is embodied in all software -- regardless of how insignificant," said the Master.

"Is the Tao in a hand-held calculator?" asked the novice.

"It is," came the reply.

"Is the Tao in a video game?" asked the novice.

"It is even in a video game," said the Master.

"Is the Tao in the DOS for a personal computer?" asked the novice.

The Master coughed and shifted his position slightly. "The lesson is over for today," he said.

You know, I really didn't know then or now. The Business school taught COBOL and RPG on, I do believe, an AS/400 they owned separate from the rest of the computer infrastructure. I might be remembering wrong, but I was pretty sure that was the story[1]. I think it was something to do with the information systems degree requirements.

1) my Dad did IT on an AS/400, I still hear "wand in" instead of login.

[edit] looks like the new requirements are a bit more inline with today's world http://business.und.edu/undergraduate/school-of-entrepreneur...

We had it too (I went to a mixed IT-business university). I think the idea was to get some perspective on what COBOL is, so if you're managing a company one day and IT people you hire tell you that something is hard to do, or takes too much time because the system is in COBOL, you know what they're talking about and don't think that they're just messing with you.

* I was just genuinely interested those things.*

Meh, I'm down with that. I would be a much richer man today had I chosen more wisely. But I would not be a happier man.

Maybe I was "unemployable".

Despite my comment to the (somewhat) contrary, as long as you're not specialist in BeOS or the like, in software you'll almost always make money doing what you like to do. Again, whatever ends up winning, the abstractions and concepts you pick up will generally prove useful where ever you end up. You might not be raking in the Benjamins like your SAP buddy over there pulling down $350K/year, but you'll be relatively wealthy and happy.

I'm continually surprised there's not a widely adopted, xBase variant for the web. It seems so obvious? Maybe there is and I'm just not aware of it.

In my first job after my training, I had a boss who had practically written a couple of bespoke line-of-business applications for customers using FoxPro.

Three years ago I had to do some maintenance on an old-ish C++ application (also a one-of-a-kind-thing) that used a dBase backend for storage. I was lucky, though, the code was very well-written and, let's say, humble - it avoided unneccessary complexities whenever possible, and even without comments or any other documentation, I was able to figure out how it worked (at least the part that I was supposed to modify).

Part of the fun was getting a development environment to work with an ancient version of Visual Studio, but the second fun part was accessing that dBase database. I tried a couple of programs, none of them overly helpful, until I realized that ____ing Excel could open them. I don't know how well Excel supports interacting with these, but it worked well enough for inspection. ;-)

Who said I'm not a mainframe programmer? :)

I've worked for a big financial corp. I was in one of their mainframe teams for a year or so [1]. There's still a lot I don't know but I sure know Rexx is the most fun you can have on a mainframe. It's kind of like the polar opposite of JCL, or getting stuck on a TSO command line.

The first reason why Rexx is great for parsing is the fact that variables equal themselves. There's no "string" data type. If you type "myvar" then that's the name and the contents of your variable (unless you assign it another value):

  DO INDEX = 1 TO 10 BY 2
  SAY HELLO
  END
  
  /* Outputs:
     HELLO
     HELLO
     HELLO
     HELLO
     HELLO
     ***  
   */

Skipping the assignment reduces clutter and makes it very easy to see what you're dealing with. Unless you mess it up later, obviously.

Second, for parsing, Rexx has a keyword instruction called ...(drumroll)... PARSE that essentially implements pattern-matching, of some sort, probably as a regular automaton like regexes but without the regex syntax which is actually really nice. Instead, you define a pattern as a string with literals and variables and the special symbol '.' (a period) to indicate any token, (that's similar to the regex '.' but it matches between spaces).

Here's an example from my notes from that time (spaces delimit literals and variables) [2]:

  /* Fun with patterns at the REXXREPL*/ 
  BANDS = 'SLAYER, BATHORY, MOTORHEAD, VENOM'
  PARSE VAR BANDS ABAND ', ' BEST ', ' REST  
  SAY ABAND                                  
   SLAYER                                    
  SAY BEST                                   
   BATHORY                                   
  SAY REST                                   
   MOTORHEAD, VENOM                          
  PARSE VAR BANDS . ', ' BEST ', ' REST /* Skipped Slayer */
  SAY BEST                                 
   BATHORY                                 
  SAY REST                                 
   MOTORHEAD, VENOM

You can also use numbers to indicate positions in a string (absolute, in the example below, but there's also relative ones):

  DIGITS = '11001011'                        
  PARSE VAR DIGITS FIRSTTWO 3 NEXTFOUR 7 LAST
  SAY FIRSTTWO                               
   11                                        
  SAY NEXTFOUR                               
   0010                                      
  SAY LAST                              
   11     

On top of that, Rexx has "compound variables", a data structure that (to me) resembles a tree and lets you compose hierarchical structures. For instance, here's part of a program that reads in JCL files (formatted to a standard format with another Rexx program so that everything of the same kind is in the same column) and stores their DD, dataset, step and program names in such a structure:

  /*PARSE JOBNAME OFF FIRST LINE IN JCL FILE*/                           
  PARSE VAR CA.1 '//' JOBNAME .                                          
                                                                         
  /*PARSE OTHER NAMES INTO A STEM CALLED 'MATCHES.'                      
  EACH TYPE OF NAME GOES INTO ITS OWN TAIL                               
  TAILS FOR DDNAMES AND DATASET NAMES ARE INDEXED IN TANDEM              
  SAME FOR TAILS WITH STEP AND PROGRAM NAMES                             
                                                                         
  IN OTHER WORDS, MATCHES. IS STRUCTURED AS FOLLOWS:                     
  TAIL INDEX           CONTENTS                                          
  ----------           --------                                          
  MATCHES.DDNAMES.N    N'TH DD NAME FOUND IN JCL FILE                    
  MATCHES.DSNAMES.N    DATASET NAME FOR N'TH DD NAME                     
  MATCHES.STEPNAMES.M  N'TH STEP NAME                                    
  MATCHES.PROGNAMES.M  PROGRAM NAME FOR N'TH STEP NAME                   
                                                                         
  SO, TO GET THE DATASET NAME THAT CORRESPONDS                           
  TO THE 5TH DD AND DATASET NAME                                         
  FOUND IN THE JCL FILE, YOU LOOK INTO:                                  
      MATCHES.DDNAMES.5                                                  
      MATCHES.DSNAMES.5                                                  
  */                                                                     
  DO INDEX = 2 TO CA.0 BY 1                                              
      PARSE VAR CA.INDEX '//' DDNAME . 'DSN=' DSNAME ','                 
      /* IF DD NAME IS EMPTY, DON'T ASSUME DDNAME='DD'*/                 
      IF DDNAME = 'DD' THEN                                              
          DDNAME = ''                                                    
      PARSE VAR CA.INDEX '//' STEPNAME . 'EXEC' PROGNAME ','             
  IF DSNAME ¬= ''                                                        
     THEN                                                                
         MATCHES.DDNAMES.INDEX = DDNAME                                  
         MATCHES.DSNAMES.INDEX = DSNAME                                  
  IF PROGNAME ¬= ''                                                      
     THEN                                                                
         MATCHES.STEPNAMES.INDEX = STEPNAME                              
         MATCHES.PROGNAMES.INDEX = PROGNAME                              
  END                                                                    

(The above will probably make more sense if you've seen a jcl script before).

The point is that all of that is very hard to do with COBOL, and, I believe, impossible with JCL [3]. In Rexx on the other hand, it's a doozy.

I also note that all of the above is nice to have in any language and that not very many of the languages popular outside of mainframes let you parse strings that easily, without explicitly calling a regex library or such.

_______________

[1] I raised hell until they put me in one of those teams. I could get plenty of experience with Spring and Hibernate outside of that corp. Since I was there, I figured I might as well learn something I couldn't learn anywhere else as easily. Still, people looked to me as if I was mad. "You want to be on a mainframe team? Why?".

Dude. Big computers. Millions of users. What the hell?

[2] Note that the "REXXREPL" in my comment is a Rexx program running on TSO (the Z/OS command line, ish):

  /* REXX INTERPRET */              
  REPLPROMPT = "SAY  '>>'"          
  INTERPRET REPLPROMPT              
  DO FOREVER                        
    PULL USERINPUT                  
    IF USERINPUT = "END" THEN EXIT 0
    INTERPRET USERINPUT ; END       

The INTERPRET instruction is another funky bit of Rexx that's real cool to have on a mainframe.

[3] Though I'm sure there's someone, somewhere still on this planet who would laugh in my face for saying that. But probably no more than four or five people.

What's the reliability of the iSeries models in terms of the per-server failures? And have they worsened or gotten better on reliability or admin side than the AS/400's that preceded them? Just curious about such things.