Many companies invested a lot of time and money to build robust in-house business applications utilizing Mainframe languages and technologies.
The majority of those utilized COBOL as the programming language and CICS as the user interfaces. Do you remember the old green screens in old SciFi movies? Those were probably built with COBOL/CICS or similar legacy code.
With the advent of personal computers, the Internet and the fancy web-browsers, users got used to the convenience of dropdown lists, checkboxes, cut-and-paste, drag-and-drop, and full color-graphical interfaces. No one wants to deal with the monotone green screens any longer.
So how can we leverage our legacy code, huge mainframe databases and our baby boomer workforce to move into the Graphical User Interface (GUI) age?
At Calance, we adapted to the new realities very early on. Our initial efforts were as simple as exposing our reports on web browsers by converting mainframe text into HTML pages and sending them to web-servers via FTP.