I’m involved with a small software house in the UK. We developed a package for Recruitment Agencies in the early 80s, written in Microfocus COBOL. Over the years, well decades really, it has gone through various updates, including the dramatic (hmm…) Year 2000 enhancement, but we decided a couple of years ago that it was time to start again. To be honest there is nothing really wrong with COBOL but we felt that a move towards Java and related technologies would give the product a much better future, and would help if and when we need to recruit any additional developers.
I looked at a few options and started with a quick Java Server Faces app. and that looked fine, but when I came upon Grails the general style and approach that the environment gives (or forces upon) the developer did seem very appropriate for our re-write. And that’s the way we have gone for several months; we’ve still got a bit to go but hopefully in the next month or so we will have our payroll functions complete and ready for release to our existing users – and then the world !
However we still have the installed COBOL users and we have written a small Java desktop application that interfaces to the existing files to upload some data to the UK Inland Revenue. We want to provide some upgrades to this app and it seemed to be a good opportunity to give Griffon a try. This blog will be used to record my experiences.
