Arnold Schwarzenegger and California’s Controller John Chiang are still jousting over the status of that supposedly dead computer language, Cobol. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, Schwarzenegger has ordered Chiang to slash salaries of California state workers in order to conserve cash until the bitterly divided State Assembly gets around to approving a new budget. But Chiang is saying he can’t do it because the state’s payroll program is written in Cobol and would – according to Chiang – take months to modify.

My guess is that Chiang doesn’t have the faintest idea whether his excuse is actually true. He’s just using it because it’s convenient and because he thinks no one will step forward to contradict him –  the state’s long-suffering IT guys and gals are used to being blamed and bullied by the pols. But last week I had the occasion to visit SHARE, the premier mainframe conference, which was held in San Jose just down the road from where I live. Based on what I saw, there is one thing I can tell you for sure, and that is that Cobol is not dead. And neither is the mainframe.

When I mentioned to one of my friends that I had been to SHAREa few 60-somethings strolling around the halls, the under 40 generation was also well represented. What struck me the most was not the advanced age of the people but the relative youth of a lot of the software being discussed. In the past few years a whole new class of mainframe applications has emerged which bring non-mainframe environments such as Java and Linux to Big Iron. WebSphere on z, Linux on z – these are much more than mere checkbox options in some bait-and-switch IBM marketing scheme. A substantial chunk of the 10,000 or so System z mainframes in the world are actually running these environments. And they are doing it for big-time production apps too, not just development.

At SHARE the sessions devoted to Java, Linux and SOA [service oriented architecture] were jammed with mainframers of all ages. IBM’s brain trust was out in force at these events to tout the new technologies. Big Blue has always been known for keeping on staff a select group of hardware and software experts whose role is explain and evangelize the products they implement. Although they really serve more as marketing mavens than as actual developers, the “Big Blue intellectuals” present at SHARE were as articulate as ever in expounding the benefits of bringing Java and Linux-based “new workloads” to the mainframe. And it seems that the customers are getting the message, or at least they are getting their checkbooks out. According to unofficial estimates, Linux and Java account for a third to a half of all the mainframe MIPS that IBM sells these days.

But what about Cobol? Surely IBM isn’t touting that as a new technology? Well, no, not exactly. But believe it or not they are promoting it as a viable platform for SOA. One particularly noteworthy presentation at SHARE delved into the intricacies of generating XML messages in Cobol. It can be done, and apparently more than one mainframe customer is doing it.

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