For Migration from COBOL to Java - POC Details

HP and Blu Age® completed a multi-step migration and modernization Proof of Concept (POC) project that took a legacy OLTP application from COBOL and DB2 on an IBM mainframe,

 - First to Java and DB2 on the HP ProLiant DL360 platform, &

 - Ultimately to Java and SQL/MX on an HP NonStop Server.

The project included comparisons of transaction execution times in the

    - ProLiant environment,

    - a hybrid NonStop and

    - Windows environment, and

    - a “pure NonStop” environment.

The NonStop Server was clearly the overall winner for the set of transactions comprising this POC.

The Blu Age1 software suite implements

- Model Driven Architecture (MDA) principles &

- Offers appropriate methods to deliver Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) application programs written in Java.

The Reverse Modeling component facilitates the extraction of business logic from the legacy code and constructs UML (Unified Modeling Language) models that can be used to generate the application in a Java framework.

The Blu Age software is packaged as a plugin for Eclipse, an open source IDE (integrated development environment) frequently used to develop Java applications.

POC configuration

Configuring the hardware and software for this POC required no extraordinary efforts.

Standard 1 GB Ethernet connections were used to connect these hardware components used for testing:

• NonStop Server: NS16004, with 10 mirrored data drives, running H06.25, SQL/MX 3.2, and NonStop Java 6.0 (1.6).

• Windows server (for Java middle layer): HP ProLiant DL360 G5, running Windows Server 2008, Java 1.6 and Blu Age 3.7.

The middleware setup required installing JBoss 7.1.1 and its dependencies.

A few minor (and common) DDL adjustments were made when the NonStop SQL/MX tables were created:

- VARCHAR columns with lengths less than 20 were changed to fixed CHAR columns of the same length. (This is a typical optimization practice for NonStop SQL.)

- BIGINT columns were changed to the equivalent NonStop SQL/MX data type, LARGEINT.

- Columns declared with DEFAULT NOT NULL syntax were given a default value of 0.