Ruby, COBOL jump on Amazon cloud

Two different companies this week announced that they have created tools that allow for software written using two different application development environments - the relatively new Ruby on Rails and the relatively ancient (but still respected and used) COBOL - to be deployed on Amazon's Web Services compute and storage clouds …

[David Harper]

What about FORTRAN?

When I can deploy FORTRAN code on Amazon Web Services, then I'll (grudgingly) admit that the cloud may be more than just a bit of fluff with good PR.

That would be FORTRAN 77, of course, the way God -- err, Backus -- intended it.

[Not That Andrew]

SHOCK! HORROR!

Mainframe programming language adapted to run on mainframe! More at Eleven!

MicroFocus - the retards who gifted us with Cobol.Net

[Francis Fish]

$129 for a rails instance?

They're taking the P. You can run one on a $20 512MB slice, assuming it isn't heavily loaded. Apache also now has mod_rails, and passenger that allow you to run multiple sites on demand, if you are happy to roll your own.

Yeah, if you need the scalability, but if you've just got a small community site then don't bother. Also have a look at Engine Yard, who have a sale on at the mo.

[Francis Fish]

D'oh

I meant Bright Box, d'oh...

[Stevie]

Bah

"Engine Yard".

"Ruby on Rails".

The railway metaphor just gets cuter and cuter. No doubt we shall see a distributed COM/web service cluster called the "Marshalling Yard" next, or perhaps a named pipe system called "Connecting Rods", or a clustered XML/XHTML transformation service called the Distributed Markup Universe (DMU).

Total bunch of wheeltappers.

Good news about the Cobol though. 'Bout time someone did something right with the cloudy web thingy. Next up: PLAN.

[Michael Wojcik]

@Not That Andrew

Re "Mainframe programming language adapted to run on mainframe":

No, it wasn't. That was the main point of the MF section of the article: no changes were made to the language, and no changes need to be made to the COBOL program source. What we demoed on the MS cloud at PDC was a piece of IBM's 1983 CICS "ACCT" demo, just as IBM wrote it.

And if you think the execution environments of the MS or Amazon clouds are anything at all like those of traditional mainframes, you're sadly mistaken.

As for .NET COBOL, some customers want it, so we provide it. Use it ourselves sometimes too. Nothing wrong with it. It compiles to IL, runs under the CLI, and integrates with the .NET Framework. For some applications that's useful.