Java and Cobol.

[Soumya Devabhaktuni]

Hai,
I know we can talk to a cobol program from a Java Program. But is it possible to talk to a java program from a cobol porgram?
Please let me know abt this.
Thanks and Regards,
Soumya.

[Cindy Glass]

What do you mean by "talk to"? They can certainly pass information to each other via files or databases. Certainly Cobol can put out XML formatted files that can be used by Web pages and processed by Java functionality.
Are you asking if you can "invoke" a java program from a Cobol program? Or call an Java Program and get a return value??

[Soumya Devabhaktuni]

Hai cindy,
Thank U for the reply.
Yes I want to invoke a Java program from a cobol Program. Let me know if this is possible. The platform is OS/390.
Regards,
Soumya.

[Dilbert Adams]

I am curious too.
I need to have Java and Cobol shake hands, if not any more.
To be precise: I wonder how to invoke Java methods from Cobol.
And the scenic routes like invoking applet/servlet/jsp pages are gonna be too cumbersome.
So, how can we:
1) Declare a java object in a Cobol Program ?
2) Invoke a method on that object from that very program ?
Ideal case would be to communicate across TCP/IP thru some SNA/TCP-IP gateway (like via using REXX), but as the first step, we can throw that complication out.
I am reading up on Enterprise Cobol; hopefully someone over here has already charted those waters
Thanks in advance.

[Joel McNary]

"Cut Nase",
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[Stan James]

Do you have a good IBM rep? I recall seeing that they had ECI or some similar protocol from CICS to an OS/390 Linux partition.
You might look at MQ-Series, too. It's probably overkill if you have two partitions on the same machine, but maybe not. We use it heavily between mainframe CICS and servers and workstations coded in multiple languages.