Experience migrating legacy Cobol/PL1 to Java

Question

ORIGINAL Q: I\'m wondering if anyone has had experience of migrating a large Cobol/PL1 codebase to Java?

How automated was the process and how main

Answer 1

It was clearly our intent to obtain initial java code that was very close to the original cobol in order to facilitate the migration of people: they find the good old app they wrote in cobol in exact same structure.

one of our most important goals was to keep initial developers on board: that's the way we found to achieve it. When application migrated to Java, those people can start make it more OO as they further develop / refactor it.

If you don't care about migrating people, you can use other strategy.

This 1-to-1 conversion also made 100% automated conversion simpler & faster: the good consequence is that we made our recurring savings (3 millions euros / year) much faster: we estimate 12-18 months. Those early savings can clearly be reinvested in OO refactoring

feel free to contact me: didier.durand@publicitas.com or mediaandtech@gmail.com

didier