Interactive COBOL

Interactive COBOL (ICOBOL) is a general-purpose COBOL based on ANSI-74 COBOL with many ANSI-85 features and useful extensions. It is available for today's  major open-system operating system platforms. The product includes compatibility modes for several different COBOL dialects, including AOS/VS COBOL from Data General (our former product VX/COBOL).

ICOBOL was designed with these key factors in mind:

• Application portability
  ICOBOL applications are portable across all supported operating system and hardware platforms. This portability extends to the program files that comprise the application, the data files, and even most system management functions and operating procedures.
  
  
• Scalability
  Because of many years of performance tuning and various networking solutions, the ICOBOL products are noted for their scalability. That means you can configure an appropriate solution based on your specific application, budget, and performance needs, and easily scale up or down to another environment if those factors change in the future.
  
  
• Multi-user support
  Features such as record locking and exclusive file access that are an afterthought in some systems are at the heart of ICOBOL. In developing ICOBOL, we have always remained sensitive to multi-user performance issues, such as efficient file access and terminal I/O.
  
  
• Pricing consistent with your solution needs
  The ICOBOL product is divided into runtime and development components with a number of optional modules. This allows you tailor a system with just the components you need for a cost-effective solution. Our pricing is sensitive to your needs and consistent with the scale of your solution.

A more thorough description of the product structure can be found  on the Runtime,  Development, and Optional Modules pages, but here are some highlights of the newest features found in ICOBOL 4. For complete details, visit the Download page to get the latest readme files, the Documentation page to get complete product documentation, and the ICOBOL 3 History page for more detail on the ICOBOL 3 releases.

• Dual-mode (character/GUI) ThinClient with automatic reconnection capabilities
• Enhanced logging and mirroring facilities for data protection and integrity
• Updated networking infrastructure for our client-server products
• Helper functions for reading and writing .csv format files
• The ability to directly write PDF files with or without a background form
• Bidirectional PIPE opens in UNIX and PIPE support in Windows
• New calls to allow the application to perform operations on a thin client system
• Support for Apple Mac OS X
• New intrinsic functions that parallel existing builtin calls
• Heartbeat support in client/server products for better detection of a lost connection
• Support in ISQL for getting table and column information
• New intrinsic functions to help support new ISQL features
• A new client/server surrogate that provides services for ISQL