The good news is that you can be successful in porting an application from
MPE to HP-UX. You have picked a good time to do such a thing.

We have collected what is probably the most complete collection of tools
that can be used to migrate COBOL/VPlus/IMAGE applications to UNIX and NT
platforms. These tools come from a variety of sources and include a large
set of Intrinsics, a selection of databases and a selection of VPlus
replacements.  Many of our tools have been in use at various sites for over
9 years.

Fundamentally, there are two main initial choices in rehosting applications,
they are, emulation and translation.  All tools fall into those categories.
Examples of emulation tools include such things as HP Eloquence, a
replacement for IMAGE that runs on UNIX and NT and Wingspan, a character
mode replacement for VPlus.  The Intrinsic libraries are also examples of
emulators.  What emulators do is give your programs the impression that they
are still running on MPE.  Other needed emulators include spoolers, JCL,
utilities such as SORT, batch job managers, NETIPC, IMAGE calls to RDBMS
calls, etc.

Translators can be relatively simple dialect translators such as COBOL II to
Micro Focus COBOL, or FORTRAN for the HP 3000 to FORTRAN for the HP 9000.
However, sometimes it is simpler, necessary of more desirable to translate
from a language like BASIC/3000 to C or C++.

There are a lot of pitfalls in migrating applications.  Some of the most
common include focusing on only one aspect of the migration, such as going
to a GUI or the COBOL dialect translation, assuming that all of the rest
will "fall into place".  Another is to assume that it's easy to just replace
the IMAGEism's from the code with SQL calls.  Yet another is to use people
instead of tools to do the job.

Before undertaking such and effort, it is crucial to identify all aspects of
how the application will function in the target environment.  The next step
is to actually port a small application as a proof of concept.  With the
right selection of tools, this should be feasible.  Such a trial port will
expose any major weaknesses in your plan.

Charles Finley
Transformix Computer Corporation
(310) 630-1773
(310) 630-1770

> -----Original Message-----
> From: HP-3000 Systems Discussion [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On
> Behalf Of Bob Hemmer
> Sent: Tuesday, September 14, 1999 2:22 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: migrating from HP3000 to HP9000 unix
>
>
> If you have any experience, good or bad, with migrating legacy
> applications
> from HP3000, MPE/iX to HP9000, HP-UX, (or client/server) and are
> willing to
> discuss it, please let me know.   I am specifically interested in moving a
> large body of COBOL programs which use IMAGE, VPLUS, and system intrinsic
> calls.   I know there was a thread for this topic over a year
> ago.  I wonder
> if anyone has more (or less) recent experience to share?
>