RE: Excel Prototypes for cobol programmers

"I have a request from the Cobol group to use those prototypes."

"Can these be compiled into service programs for use in Cobol?"

As Scott has noted, COBOL has no built-in support for the JNI interface as
RPG does. Similarly it has no way to directly define Java objects.

While it is possible to do all of this via direct JNI calls this is a task
best suited for masochists. If your COBOL team includes people who think
that lashing themselves with razor wire while walking on burning coals is
"Jolly good fun" then I would advise them to go ahead and try it. But they
won't find many people able to help them heal their wounds!

Do them a favor and identify those procedures that take objects as parms or
return objects, and simply create simple wrappers for them that call the RPG
routines. There shouldn't be too much work - you just need to generate a
unique Id for each of the Java objects you create for them. Indeed since
the Object is in effect a 10i (I think) then you could simply redefine that
and pass it to them so they are directly referencing the objects. That
should work pretty well.

Jon Paris
Partner400

www.Partner400.com