For many of our initial client meetings, theres a palpable sense of disbelief (or, healthy skepticism if you prefer).

A shiny object that distracts you from the complexity ahead, and one that steers you towards an expensive multi-year services-led engagement that is aligned with the vendors business model, not yours.

All the data for this application was previously migrated from VSAM (EBCDIC encoded) to an RDBMS (ASCII encoded).

In later articles, well demonstrate how Heirloom migrates mainframe batch, data and security profiles just as quickly.

People are obviously a big part of the IP equation, and securing the engagement of IT staff is essential to ensure a successful transformation.

This extends the lifetime of the voyager 1 probe for another 2 or 3 years.

We can use the same analogy for existing mainframe applications.

This will extend the lifetime of these applications and actually increase their value to your company.

Migrated applications do not just run in a new environment, their data, previously hidden away in an EBCDIC silo, suddenly becomes accessible to the rest of the enterprise.

Imagine adding decades of experience in the form of your companies data to a big data model designed to generate actionable business insights.

Agile Guru, Martin Fowler puts it best (he usually does) when he says.

If you are not following a continuous integration approach this will only be discovered near release, resulting in many late nights for the developers and even more grey hairs for the project owners.

It is at this point that coding standards fall precipitously and hacking a change in to make it work can ensure that the next project delivery starts with, often, severe technical debts.

Unless you are the US government this debt will have to be paid resulting in longer release cycles and missing features.

Because mainframe code compiled with Heirloom runs on the Java VM we are in the great position that we can utilize all the Java infrastructure that has been built in the last few years to support enterprise application development.

We add COBOL and PL1 as fully supported languages to the industry standard Eclipse development environment.

With Heirloom, BMS screen definitions are automatically transformed into HTML5 templates with the initial template design mimicking the green screen that mainframe users are familiar with.

See an earlier post for a typical green screen sample program Mainframe Migration Why.

Jenkins then notifies the developers that the build was good (or not) on a different slack channel.

It also enables you to transform your developer and integration processes.

When you use Heirloom your mainframe projects and developers are now full citizens, and can adopt, industry best practices for continuous integration and deployment.

It is a different reliability model to be sure but one to which the organisation is gradually becoming accustomed.

Need to have a little performance kick for black Friday, just automatically scale out some more application instances, and pay for the extra throughput performance ONLY when it is needed.

Financial Accounting Program Cobol