Reengineering COBOL with Objects: Step by Step to Sustainable Legacy Systems

Using COBOL as the programming language, this book explains how to change legacy systems into modern flexible platforms for growth and development. The computer departments of large organizations spend most of their time maintaining older systems. Most of these systems are written in COBOL. This book provides a step by step approach for eliminating the maintenance backlog by using the techniques of object oriented design. The first sections show how older methods of writing COBOL programs lead to logic that clogs programs with complexity and chokes off further development. By using objects, the book describes a complete methodology for taking these older systems and rebuilding them. In the process, the programmer gradually removes the older logic and replaces it with object oriented code. The result is systems that are adaptable to new technologies in COBOL, even though it is not an object oriented language. Along with an explanation of objects, the book presents a complete methodology for changing older systems with the new techniques.