node-open-cobol

This is a wrapper method to pass COBOL code to open-cobol (on Linux) using node.js

It's inspired by node-cobol.

Installation

$ npm install open-cobol

Usage

There are several ways to use this module, explain in detail in the following sections.

Use as node module

The API accept two parameters:

• string input - it can be COBOL code or a path to a .cbl file contain the COBOL code
• options - currently only expecting one key args (or just pass nothing) this contain array of values that will pass to the COBOL code, if you require to pass values to your code.

const openCobol = require('open-cobol')
const helloCbl = `
       IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
       PROGRAM-ID. HELLO.
       ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
       DATA DIVISION.
       PROCEDURE DIVISION.
       PROGRAM-BEGIN.
       DISPLAY "Hello world".
       PROGRAM-DONE.
       STOP RUN.

`

openCobol(helloCbl)
  .then(result => {
    // result = Hello world
  })

or you put the above code in a file name hello.cbl

    IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
    PROGRAM-ID. HELLO.
    ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
    DATA DIVISION.
    PROCEDURE DIVISION.
    PROGRAM-BEGIN.
    DISPLAY "Hello world".
    PROGRAM-DONE.
    STOP RUN.

Then your js code:

openCobol('hello.cbl')
  .then(result => {
    // result = Hello world
  })

HTTP interface

You can use it as a module

const openCobolHttp = require('open-cobol/http')
// the underlying application is using Koa
openCobolHttp.listen(8080)
// this will start up the HTTP server on port 8080
// then you an post your code to it

It's expecting you to using POST using json header with the following keys

• cbl (string) - the actual COBOL code
• args (array) - any argument you want to pass to your COBOL code

Another way is to clone this repository, then execute within the root folder

$ npm start

It will start the server on port 3001

Or you can pass an PORT variable to change the port

$ PORT=8080 npm start

Then the server will run on port 8080

Docker

The quickest way is to pull our docker images

For x86

$ docker pull joelchu/ubuntu-node-open-cobol 

Then just run it

$ docker run -d -p 3001:3001 -v /path/to/where/you/want:/home/app/data:rw joelchu/ubuntu-node-open-cobol 

This will run the node-open-cobol in http mode. Then just submit your COBOL code to http://localhost:3001, also the compiled COBOL code will be in the /path/to/where/you/want folder.

For ARM

There are two more images for ARM platform (They were build on Raspberry pi 4b)

• joeljiezhu/ubuntu-node-open-cobol
• joeljiezhu/ubuntu-node-open-cobol-cn (this one with source.list from Tsinghua University)

And finally, you can clone this repo and build it yourself. There are Dockerfile and Dockerfile-cn on the root level of this repo.

Using the cli

The command line version is just a simple HTTP client that will call the HTTP intreface, it's handy for doing some quick test.

$ npm i node-open-cobol -g

Then you will get a nodecobc command

First start up your node-open-cobol/http interface, or run the docker image, then:

$ nodecobc /path/to/your/file.cbl

If you have change the port (default is 3001) then you can

$ nodecobc /path/to/your/file.cbl -p 12345

You can also type nodecobc --help to learn more

MIT

Joel Chu (2020)