Best Application Development Software for COBOL - Page 2

Rocket COBOL is development and runtime environment that helps enterprises maintain, enhance, and modernize distributed COBOL applications. Rocket COBOL products standardize COBOL development alongside other languages, giving teams access to industry standard tools, flexible deployment options, and DevOps workflows. With Rocket COBOL products, engineering teams work with COBOL in industry-standard tools such as Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, and Eclipse. It delivers advanced editing and debugging, continuous background compilation, and code analysis to speed development and onboarding. Its portable deployment platform enables low risk moves to new infrastructure, supports cloud, container, and ARM environments, and integrates smoothly with APIs, .NET, and JVM ecosystems. Rocket products also extend the value of large COBOL systems by making them easier to understand and evolve. GenAI powered insights help teams work confidently with COBOL and accelerate delivery.

OpenFrame from TmaxSoft is a comprehensive mainframe modernization and replatforming solution that enables organizations to migrate legacy mainframe applications and data to open systems such as Linux, Unix, Docker containers, or public cloud environments without modifying existing business logic, preserving core functionality while reducing total cost of ownership and avoiding risky rewrites. It delivers a future-oriented, standard three-tier architecture that improves performance, stability, flexibility, and scalability compared with traditional mainframes, with support for over 100K MIPS and increased processing capacity. OpenFrame uses advanced compiler technology and an integrated asset analysis environment (OF Manager) to automatically convert user interface logic, application logic, and data structures so applications run natively in open environments with minimal manual effort, enabling existing personnel and skill sets to be retained.

Rocket Visual COBOL Personal Edition is a free, academic-use development environment that allows students and professionals to learn modern COBOL inside today’s most popular IDEs, including Visual Studio, Eclipse, and Visual Studio Code. It provides advanced editing, debugging, continuous background compilation, and intelligent code analysis to accelerate learning and productivity. With support for both .NET and JVM ecosystems, learners can combine COBOL with C#, Java, and other modern languages in a single toolset. Designed specifically for education and skills development, it offers a one-year student developer license at no cost. It also helps new developers build foundational COBOL abilities while enabling experienced programmers to explore modernization techniques. With over 100,000 downloads, it remains one of the most trusted ways to learn and practice COBOL development.

Rocket® COBOL Analyzer is a static code analysis and application intelligence tool designed to provide full visibility into COBOL applications, regardless of their scale or complexity. It enables developers to analyze, visualize, and plan code changes with confidence by delivering continuous code analysis directly within their development environment, allowing them to evaluate the impact of modifications before and after implementation. It offers interactive visualizations that map application structures, dependencies, and relationships, giving stakeholders a clear and current understanding of how systems evolve over time. It includes customizable code search capabilities and reporting frameworks that allow teams to quickly locate relevant logic, generate insights, and maintain control over large and complex codebases.

CodeTurn is Astadia’s automated mainframe code conversion product, built to automatically transform legacy source code into modern source code that is maintainable and 100% functionally equivalent to the original. It takes an application’s source code and converts it to functionally identical sources, ready to run in an alternative environment on the same platform or on a different platform altogether. Because the conversion and testing are fully automated, the outcome of the modernization project becomes highly predictable in terms of risks, costs, and duration. The migrated application is free of dependencies on proprietary Astadia software and relies on native industry-standard technologies instead. CodeTurn integrates all aspects of conversion to produce high-quality, functionally equivalent code and is typically used with Astadia tools such as DataTurn for legacy data migration, TestMatch for automated testing, and DataMatch for automated batch testing.

BMC AMI DevX reimagines mainframe development by helping teams build better code with less friction, stronger flow, and a more modern developer experience. It unifies agile development, testing, debugging, promotion, and delivery in a mainframe-inclusive toolchain designed to support developers at every skill level. Teams can work directly in preferred environments such as Eclipse and VS Code, reducing context switching and simplifying onboarding for new developers. BMC AMI DevX helps streamline editing, build, source code management, approvals, and deployment through Code Pipeline, enabling concurrent development, faster releases, and more secure delivery. Code Insights gives developers real-time visibility into complex mainframe applications, helping visualize logic, dependencies, and monolithic code structures, while generative AI explanations support faster understanding of unfamiliar COBOL, JCL, PL/I, and Assembler code.

Intellisys is an AI-enhanced platform for application modernization and maintenance that uses intelligent automation to enable multiple pathways to modernization, helping organizations reduce dependency on legacy technology and the costs associated with it. It supports an unparalleled number of programming languages and incorporates custom AI/ML technologies that continue to be enhanced over time. Intellisys mitigates modernization risk through a phase-based approach: documentation and analysis, followed by agile business rules extraction and/or code optimization and migration. It executes diverse modernization objectives across the application portfolio, supporting technologies. It provides a 100% automated set of reverse-engineering artifacts, helping teams analyze implemented logic, understand the impact of potential changes, and keep documentation continuously updated.

AveriSource accelerates midrange and mainframe modernization through application intelligence, business rules extraction, and AI-powered transformation. It provides a comprehensive, proven modernization technology for organizations looking to accelerate and streamline their modernization journey, with the insight, accuracy, and flexibility to support complex legacy modernization projects. From early-stage assessments through end-to-end refactor, replatform, or reimagine transformation initiatives, it aligns with modernization goals and helps teams make informed strategic decisions. It supports the full modernization journey by helping organizations assess legacy application landscapes, rationalize which applications to modernize, and execute the right modernization strategy. AveriSource Inventory develops a comprehensive understanding of legacy applications by uncovering code insights, identifying unused files, and verifying environmental completeness.

COBOL Colleague transforms legacy COBOL systems into navigable knowledge by using deterministic AI and knowledge graph technology to decode, document, and explain critical business logic with verified understanding, no hallucinations, and no guessing. It maps legacy code into clear Business Functions, giving teams a reliable way to understand what their systems actually do, where business rules live, and how changes may affect the application. Instead of spending months documenting systems manually, COBOL Colleague captures institutional knowledge automatically by slicing code to reveal complete business functions, including every derivation, condition, and dependency that influences each output field. Its proprietary analysis untangles complex COBOL structures such as REDEFINES, CALLS, PERFORMS, and GOTOs, isolating data transformation logic and producing natural language documentation that technical and business stakeholders can share.

2E simplifies IBM i application development by integrating design modeling, native code generation, and deployment tools in a single environment. It helps teams rapidly develop and modernize IBM i business applications while preserving the value of existing systems and reducing the complexity of traditional development. With 2E, developers can design applications at a higher level of abstraction and automatically generate native IBM i code, helping improve productivity, consistency, and maintainability across the application lifecycle. It supports model-based development, enabling teams to define business rules, data structures, screens, and application logic in a structured way before generating reliable applications for IBM i environments. It helps organizations accelerate delivery, improve application quality, and make development more accessible by reducing the amount of manual coding required.

SQL-Ease for Db2 for z/OS helps developers speed up application review, debugging, and SQL performance tuning without leaving the ISPF edit session. It reduces program development time by allowing programmers to test and fine-tune SQL statements before the program is compiled. Embedded SQL can be tested, debugged, and tuned directly from the ISPF editor, with functions for generating, standardizing, checking, executing, explaining, and analyzing SQL. SQL-Ease generates syntactically correct SELECT, UPDATE, DELETE, INSERT, MERGE, JOIN, UNION, and subselect statements for COBOL, Assembler, SPUFI, PL/I, and C programs, then places the SQL at the specified location. It can standardize hand-coded SQL into a consistent, easy-to-read format, check SQL syntax, execute SQL from an application program or SQL Editor, and return results with important execution statistics.