Scripting Languages and COBOL

The use of scripting languages with other languages has increased over the last couple of years, from a simple case of interoperability, reuse of scripting code to allowing your code to customised via the user of external scripts. All of which are real world examples I have seen customers use.

Interoperability between languages is very important to COBOL environments just as much as other languages. Some platforms such as Microsoft’s .Net with their CLR makes life much easier by allowing all languages to share a common infrastructure ie: the instruction set and the VM (MSIL and CLR) along with a base class library to get you started.

Environments such as Sun’s VM (JVM) provide two different approaches to interoperability with Java, the first is via JNI/JNA and the second is producing bytecode that runs as is on the VM.

Although the Micro Focus COBOL compiler does not support JVM bytecode or Java source generation it does have support for invoking classes/methods via the OO invoke verb.

This mechanism is very simple to use, you just need to let our object COBOL runtime know the class is a Java class, which can be done by placing $JAVA$ before the name of the class and ensuring the class itself can be found by the JVM itself usually by adding an extra directories or .jar files to the CLASSPATH environment variable.

With Java 6.0 and JSR 223 support for Java based scripting languages were provided via the package javax.script.

Java has a wealth of scripting languages from awk to xlst. My favourites being jpython, jruby and javascript.

The java.net website has a comprehensive list of scripting languages –
https://scripting.dev.java.net/.

To use the scripting packages, you first need to create a ScriptEngineManager, then use this to create a specific ScriptEngine object for your chosen scripting language and use it.

For example:

In COBOL this is quite simply:


*> ooctrl(+p) required for COM and Java classes
*> ooctrl(-f) used to preserve case of method names for Java
$set ooctrl(+p) ooctrl(-f)

The actual Javascript being execute is contained in the invoke statement, which is simply:


print('Hello, world!')


To use the above example, we first need to compile the code and run it.. which is done as follows:


C:jscriptingHelloWorld>cobol cbljscript.cbl int();
Micro Focus Net Express V5
Version 6.0.00059 Copyright (C) 1984-2009 Micro Focus (IP) Limited.
URN AXCGG/AA0/00000
* Checking complete with no errors - starting code generation
* Generating cbljscript
* Data: 848 Code: 1992 Literals: 904

C:jscriptingHelloWorld>runm cbljscript
Micro Focus Net Express V6.0.00059
RUN TIME ENVIRONMENT Copyright (C) 1984-2009 Micro Focus (IP) Limited.
URN AXCGG/AA0/00000
Hello, world!


This is just the start, the next thing piece that is required with interoperability to another language is the ability to pass parameters to in and out of the script. Luckily for us the clever chaps on the jsr group have provided ‘put’ and ‘get’ methods that allows us to simply put a name parameter and get the resulting updated or new parameter.

So consider the example, where we need to setup a parameter called ‘message’ for the script and then read a parameter called ‘replyMessage’ after the script has been executed. The javascript to do this is:


/* Do some insanity checking! */
if (typeof(message) == 'undefined')
{
message = "ERROR - 'message' has not been setup"
}

replyMessage = "Hello from javascript"


To setup the message parameter, we just need todo.


*> Put a variable in engine, so the javascript
*> can use it.
invoke ws-javascript "put" using
z"message"
z"Hello World from COBOL!"
end-invoke

The after the script has executed, we just need to use the ‘get’ method..


*> get a variable in engine
invoke ws-javascript "get" using
z"replyMessage"
returning ws-message
end-invoke

*> now display the replyMessage if it is available
if ws-message not equal null
invoke ws-pout "println" using ws-message
else
display "Javascript did not set a replyMessage var"


The completed COBOL example below, uses a side file for the javascript too, the code is as follows:


*> ooctrl(+p) required for COM and Java classes
*> ooctrl(-f) used to preserve case of method names for Java
$set ooctrl(+p) ooctrl(-f)

stop run.



C:jscriptingHelloWorld3>cobol cbljscript.cbl int();
Micro Focus Net Express V5
Version 6.0.00059 Copyright (C) 1984-2009 Micro Focus (IP) Limited.
URN AXCGG/AA0/00000
* Checking complete with no errors - starting code generation
* Generating cbljscript
* Data: 888 Code: 2528 Literals: 1296

C:jscriptingHelloWorld3>runm cbljscript
Micro Focus Net Express V6.0.00059
RUN TIME ENVIRONMENT Copyright (C) 1984-2009 Micro Focus (IP) Limited.
URN AXCGG/AA0/00000
Hello World from COBOL!
Hello from javascript


As you can see from the code above, setting up parameter is pretty easy todo but sometimes we just want to execute a function in the scripting language such as:


function testMessage(msg)
{
print("testMessage : " + msg);
}


The ScriptEngine object that we have created to use the scripting engine may implement an optional interface called javax.script.Invocable, if the scripting engine we are using does provide this interface then a method called invokeFunction(..) can be used.

In order to reduce the size of the COBOL code, I have coded a simple utils class in java as a simple proxy layer, the code is pretty simple but does make it easier for the COBOL to use the invokeFunction() method.

Then from the COBOL side, we can just use the invokeFunction above.