Editorial

RainCode manipulates source code and performs automatic transformations on the code. The most impressive achievement in this area is of course the ability to migrate applications from one programming language to another. A testimonial of TPG Consulting's Neil Garrioch will illustrate one example of such migration from CA-IDEAL to COBOL.

Testimonial

"TPG Technology Consulting Ltd. has established an enviable reputation for providing technical services (technical support and system programming services) for OS/390 mainframe, LAN and desktop environments, including capacity and performance management functions. The company has consistently maintained a high level of expertise in enterprise systems, network management and the data centre functions, upon which many mission critical corporate applications rely.

Public Works and Government Services Canada (PWGSC) had several critical applications written in Ideal, a programming language for mainframes supported by Computer Associates. These applications also accessed Datacom databases. PWGSC wanted to migrate these applications to COBOL/DB2, and asked us to take care of the conversion. We dealt with the database conversion and asked The RainCode Company in Belgium to perform the language migration.

The RainCode technology was chosen to carry out this translation, as the achieved automation guarantees the total functional equivalence between the initial Ideal source code and the final COBOL one. Considering the critical character of the applications to be converted, PWGSC required such guarantees, for functional equivalence. Moreover, the script-based process used for the migration gave us the flexibility to see the application translated in the specific style we wanted.

RainCode has been great to deal with. Collaboration between TPG and RainCode has worked quite well. We communicated daily using Internet technologies, and allowed RainCode to log on our mainframe to compile and test their scripts.

The system has been in production a few weeks now, and works fine. We are very satisfied with the result, as is Public Works and Government Services of Canada, our final customer."

Neil Garrioch, TPG Consulting Ltd.

The process

The migration process consists of three fully automated consecutive phases.

• First, we perform an IDEAL-to-IDEAL migration. In this phase, the RainCode Engine for IDEAL normalizes the IDEAL source in order to reduce the number of cases to handle, and to simplify the migration mechanism.
• The second phase is the actual IDEAL to COBOL migration, where all IDEAL constructs are converted to semantically equivalent COBOL constructs.
• As third and last step, we enhance the generated COBOL to make it feel as if it had actually been written by a COBOL programmer: correct identation, pretty printing, etc.

That's all folks !!!

In our next newsletter, we will tell you, as previously announced, how RainCode renovates COBOL code to improve its structure and readability, for instance, when dealing with generated COBOL code, for which the original tool is not supported any longer.