Technical information

The RainCode Checker for COBOL provides you with a convenient infrastructure to check automatically for compliance with company-specific or standard coding conventions in your COBOL code. The Checker analyzes the COBOL source files, detects where the coding rules have been violated, and generates a detailed report listing the encountered offences.

Based on the RainCode Engine for COBOL's static analysis capabilities, the RainCode Checker for COBOL enables you to verify simple as well a complex coding rules:

Lexical rules: "Identifier homonymy is forbidden"
Syntactical rules: "THEN keywords are mandatory"
Naming conventions: "COMP variable names must end with CMP"
...

Flexibility

RainCode Checker for COBOL verifies about 70 coding rules by default. It allows you to select the rules you actually want the RainCode Checker to check, or to use them as examples to code your own rules in the tool.
The tool is multi-platform (Windows, Unix, Solaris, and all Unix-like)
RainCode Checker is adaptable: each company can have its specific RainCode Checker for COBOL, with its own coding guidelines.

Testing and documentation

The Checker allows you to attach a set of positive and negative examples to each rule, so that valid cases (where the rule has been satisfied) can be compared with invalid cases (where the rule triggers an offence).

The regression testing facility checks that each rule is correctly implemented, and documents what each rule does in the generated report.

Report Generation

After you have checked the whole project against a set of rules, you can ask RainCode Checker to generate a report with different levels of detail. This report in PDF format can be used:

as a deliverable for a third party, which lists all the sources which have been checked, with the matching list of offences; or
as a complete documentation of the coding guidelines used within the organization or project.

Two operating mode

The RainCode Checker for COBOL comes with a user-friendly GUI for convenient definition of coding guideline projects, enabling or disabling individual coding rules, etc.

The Checker can also be used in batch mode for unattended checking of large source code portfolio.

Evaluation Version

To see what the RainCode Checker for COBOL feels like, and what it can do for you, just register here and log in. On the download page, you will have access to the evaluation version, which is build on a sample set of COBOL sources.

Need more information?

February 2009: RainCode's Datacom migration solution, named DataKom version 3.0 is released. It includes support for the most exotic and dynamic features of Datacom, and can target Oracle or DB/2 for persistence.

November 2008: Version 2.0 of RainCode's coding guidelines enforcement tool The RainCode Checker will be released in January 2009. The Checker is available for Ada, C and COBOL, and comes as an Eclipse plugin for its user interface.

September 2008: Raincode is now member of the Mainframe Migration Alliance. Check this press release for more information.

August 2008: All the versions of the RainCode engine can now access a number of relational databases, including Oracle, MySql and Postgres.

March 2008: RainCode proudly releases a complete Datacom migration solution named DataKom which covers all aspects of Datacom migration: CA-IDEAL, COBOL programs and data migration.

September 2007: The RainCode Engine for COBOL computes the size and offsets of data elements according to the ANSI standard, and can be used to find and analyze data elements based on how and where they are represented physically in memory.

RainCode is a proud member of the Mainframe Migration Alliance