Now that the State of California has pretty much resolved its latest budget crisis, it might be a good time to revisit the whole issue of aging Cobol applications.

One of the issues that came to light during this crisis is that the Cobol applications that the state relies on to manage its payroll systems are not flexible enough to deal with instantaneous changes that were being proposed by the governor. This led to a lot of criticism of Cobol in general and, in particular, questions concerning whether Cobol could continue to meet the demands of corporations that increasing value flexibility in IT.

Naturally, the folks at Micro Focus, who make tools for Cobol programmers, take issue with a lot of barbs being tossed the way of their favorite programming language.

The acknowledge there are a lot inflexible Cobol applications out there. They just maintain that most of that inflexibility stems from the methodology used to build those applications rather than the language itself.

They argue that Cobol is as responsive as an third generation language in use today. What people need is a better Cobol framework to refurbish a lot of those applications. That's a critical point, they argue, because we're still in period of relative infancy when it comes to exposing business processes, largely written in Cobol, across the Web.

That means there is still a massive amount of work that needs to be done in terms of laying the foundation for the next generation of business-to-business applications. The choice that a lot of IT organizations will face is to either rewrite many of their existing applications or try to extend those existing applications across the Web.

Given that most of these applications have a fair amount of complex business logic, Micro Focus argues that extending them over the Web makes infinite more sense than reinventing wheels that already work.

The one problem with that approach is that Cobol is not the language that is in vogue with the most developers today. The end result is that you get a lot of younger developers pushing projects that essentially replicate things that already exist in Cobol.

In fact, Mark Haynie, the CTO of Micro Focus, argues that most of the consumer applications that drive a lot of the biggest companies on the Web are relatively simple applications by Cobol standards. He doubts that there are many developers out there that really have the skill sets needed to develop applications from scratch that reflect complex business processes on the Web.

We'll have to wait a few years to see if Haney is ultimately proven right. But one thing for sure is that stuff people are building on the Web today is still relatively simple, which means the opportunities ahead are still far greater than everything that has been accomplished to date.