Automated Refactoring of a U.S. Department of Defense Mainframe to AWS

Re:Automated Refactoring of a U.S. Department of Defense Mai... by ThinkBeat on Monday May 06, 2019 @01:09PM (#19841459)

It will be interesting to see how this works out, but I doubt we will hear much publically about it again.

I have been involved in a somwhat similar project where we had a large system written in an obsolete language. It was HUGE. And it ran fine. With millions of transaction. But it required expensive hardware to run it.

The decision was made to convert it to Java. The effort took years, and the rend result was not impressive I thought.

In a lot of ways Java was a step down in abstraction from the more DSL original langauge. Implementing new rules took more time, and running it took a lot more orchtecstration.

I am not convinced that it would have been better to hire and train a few devs in the old system and let it keep doing its thing for a few decades more.

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Re:Automated Refactoring of a U.S. Department of Defense Mai... by iSnow on Monday May 06, 2019 @02:41PM (#19842441)

The article implies it wasn't a very nice or well-structured codebase, so I guess they didn't make it much worse.

And they ripped out the COBOL Data management system and replaced it with a RDBMS. This alone probably is worth it since you can hook it up to business intelligence tools now to create reports and dashboards.

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Re:Automated Refactoring of a U.S. Department of Defense Mai... by lallysingh on Monday May 06, 2019 @02:35PM (#19842381)

The old language was domain specific, of course it was a better set of abstractions for what you care about.

But maintaining and extending the thing was only going to get more expensive. And once you've paid the price to modernize, you've bought yourselves a lot of savings for 1-2 decades, maybe more.

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Re:Automated Refactoring of a U.S. Department of Defense Mai... by new4thaccount on Monday May 06, 2019 @05:57PM (#19844332)

Did you? That system was already working and it sounds like it just needed a couple of decent Devs. I'm sure the hardware is not cheap, but surely it's cheaper than a full Java rewrite with new hardware?

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Re:Automated Refactoring of a U.S. Department of Defense Mai... by lallysingh on Monday May 06, 2019 @07:11PM (#19844865)

Mainframe hardware is crazy expensive. There was an old saying from an ex-IBM'er that each one came with a free engineer. Because that's how much they cost.

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Re:Automated Refactoring of a U.S. Department of Defense Mai... by jaden on Tuesday May 07, 2019 @12:00AM (#19846426)

A former employer had mainframes that weren't permitted to run at full capacity without paying even more. They were so entrenched they paid IBM thousands of dollars whenever they exceeded their allotment.

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Re:Automated Refactoring of a U.S. Department of Defense Mai... by cr0sh on Tuesday May 07, 2019 @01:10PM (#19851352)

At one time IBM (and probably other manufacturers) installed RAM and hard drive capacity, but didn't enable it. If you wanted more capacity, they sent out an engineer to basically "flip a switch" (more or less). You always had that ability, but not until they enabled it.

We kinda see something similar today with Tesla - and we'll probably see more of it in the future.

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Re:Automated Refactoring of a U.S. Department of Defense Mai... by user5994461 on Monday May 06, 2019 @02:31PM (#19842345)

Was it COBOL?

COBOL is a very niche language that is very well specialized to banking. I don't envision applications rewritten in something else easily for any significant benefit.

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Re:Automated Refactoring of a U.S. Department of Defense Mai... by bashinator on Monday May 06, 2019 @11:18PM (#19846175)

Could have been MUMPS

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