> would seem to suggest that rather than retraining ones COBOL
> programmers, one would be better off just hiring skilled Java
> programmers.

Well, I've seen COBOL programmers who enjoyed adding Java to the mix.

On a second thought... how about adding a Java programmer to the COBOL
programmer and have the two team up to combine each other's experience?

A colleague of mine has never written a COBOL program to access IMAGE
data, but with a little help he started creating web pages that provide
access to Image/SQL data using Java Servlets and JDBC... (supplementing
the existing VPLUS application, not replacing it)

Lars.