Written by COBOL Programming Course Co-Chairs Sudharsana Srinivasan (IBM) and Mike Bauer (Broadcom)
Open Mainframe Project’s COBOL Programming Course has continued interest from learners seeking a hands-on learning experience for COBOL development on the mainframe platform. In addition to those consuming the course content, we also added significant contributions from two spectacular mentees during the year.
Sudharasana Srinivasan (left), Rituraj Mahato (middle), Mike Bauer (right) at IBM TechXchange
Staying Current with Zowe V3
Rituraj Mahato updated the course to integrate features from the Zowe V3 release. This included adjusting the installation and configuration content as well as updating numerous images to stay current. One of the more important updates was ensuring that the course always recommended setting up Zowe CLI and Zowe Explorer with Team Configuration. Team Configuration improves the experience of maintaining connection information to mainframe services and makes it easy to share the configuration with others in your organization. This feature was available since V2, but is now required in V3. If you are interested in team configuration, you can learn more about it here.
Automated COBOL Testing with GitHub Actions
Ali Mohamed updated the course to automate the process of unit testing COBOL programs by leveraging GitHub actions. GitHub actions is a continuous integration and continuous delivery platform that allows you to automate things like the build, test, and deployment of your applications.
Previously, Ashis Kumar (who was also a Mentor this year!) had added unit testing to the course by leveraging another OMP project, COBOL Check. Ali automated the setup and run of this unit testing framework. He detailed all of this in our Testing course so you can do the same!
Same Great Content, New Experience
This year, the COBOL Programming Course found a new home on the IBM Z Xplore learning platform. Why the move? 2024 was the year of updates and upgrades!! Along with awesome new content that our summer mentees worked on, the team worked with the IBM Z Xplore team to provide a seamless, frictionless, easy to use interface to register and learn COBOL.
The core mission of the COBOL Programming Course has been and continues to be – Learning COBOL. It is not about the tools, processes, or the environment. The move to this new platform was yet another step in that direction – making it easy for our learners to consume the byte sized learning modules and hands-on labs and mastering COBOL one challenge at a time!
Today’s Learners, Tomorrow’s Leaders!
The COBOL Programming Course takes immense pride in growing and training tomorrow’s leaders. Through the Open Mainframe Project summer mentorship program, the course has had summer mentees who learned COBOL, curated content for the course, and returned with recommendations to make it even better. Ashis Kumar Naik and Hartanto Widjaya are two such shining examples of mentees who came back to be mentors and helped students learn COBOL, appreciate the value the language brings to technology, and instill a sense of passion for learning and technology.
Looking Ahead – What will 2025 bring?
The course has been exploring including a section on CICS and COBOL. We are looking for folks with this experience to contribute their time and knowledge to develop the educational content and supplemental hands-on labs. In addition, if you have taken the course and have ideas for hands-on labs to help reinforce the learning material, we are interested in adding exercises. We will continue to supplement our efforts with the OMP mentorship program and are looking to our community for project ideas for 2025.
Our 2024 summer mentees Rituraj Mahato and Ali Mohammed and 2023 summer mentee & 2024 summer mentor Ashis Kumar Naik are committed to continue to support the course as committers – the open source way!
Learn more about the COBOL Programming Course and other Open Mainframe Projects in the 2024 Annual Report.
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