In May 2012 Google Chrome hit a milestone. It kicked Microsoft's Internet Explorer into excess phone oh that oh that second place as the most used browser on planet Earth.
With Microsoft being in second place, it makes a dark hole for Firefox coming in at number three. Google likes to trumpet three key reasons: security, simplicity and speed.
Available for free on Android, Linux, Mac, and Windows. It gets its speed from the open source JavaScript engine written in C++ known as V8.
In my daily use I use Microsoft's Internet Explorer version 10, Apple's Safari (on OS X) and chrome on both Windows 8 and OS X.

Admittedly people do not know anything about Internet Explorer version 10 since you can only get it on Windows 8/RT.

I do not need a crystal ball to know that the Mother of All Browser Battles is set to begin in the fall of 2012 and beyond.

I have said this before and I'm going to say it again.

Over time, companies are migrating from COBOL to the latest standard of C# solutions due to reasons such as cumbersome deployment processes, scarcity of trained developers, platform dependencies, increasing maintenance fees. Whether a company wants to migrate to reporting applications, operational infrastructure, or management support systems, shifting from COBOL to C# solutions can be time-consuming and highly risky, expensive, and complicated. However, the following four techniques can help companies reduce the complexity and risk around their modernization efforts. 

All COBOL to C# Solutions are Equal 

It can be daunting for a company to sift through a set of sophisticated services and tools on the market to boost their modernization efforts. Manual modernization solutions often turn into an endless nightmare while the automated ones are saturated with solutions that generate codes that are impossible to maintain and extend once the migration is over. However, your IT department can still work with tools and services and create code that is easier to manage if it wants to capitalize on technologies such as DevOps. 

Narrow the Focus 

Most legacy systems are incompatible with newer systems. For years now, companies have passed legacy systems to one another without considering functional relationships and proper documentation features. However, a detailed analysis of databases and legacy systems can be useful in decision-making and risk mitigation in any modernization effort. It is fairly common for companies to uncover a lot of unused and dead code when they analyze their legacy inventory carefully. Those discoveries, however can help reduce the cost involved in project implementation and the scope of COBOL to C# modernization. Research has revealed that legacy inventory analysis can result in a 40% reduction of modernization risk. Besides making the modernization effort less complex, trimming unused and dead codes and cost reduction, companies can gain a lot more from analyzing these systems. 

Understand Thyself 

For most companies, the legacy system entails an entanglement of intertwined code developed by former employees who long ago left the organization. The developers could apply any standards and left behind little documentation, and this made it extremely risky for a company to migrate from a COBOL to C# solution. In 2013, CIOs teamed up with other IT stakeholders in the insurance industry in the U.S to conduct a study that found that only 18% of COBOL to C# modernization projects complete within the scheduled period. Further research revealed that poor legacy application understanding was the primary reason projects could not end as expected. 

Furthermore, using the accuracy of the legacy system for planning and poor understanding of the breadth of the influence of the company rules and policies within the legacy system are some of the risks associated with migrating from COBOL to C# solutions. The way an organization understands the source environment could also impact the ability to plan and implement a modernization project successfully. However, accurate, in-depth knowledge about the source environment can help reduce the chances of cost overrun since workers understand the internal operations in the migration project. That way, companies can understand how time and scope impact the efforts required to implement a plan successfully. 

Use of Sequential Files 

Companies often use sequential files as an intermediary when migrating from COBOL to C# solution to save data. Alternatively, sequential files can be used for report generation or communication with other programs. However, software mining doesn’t migrate these files to SQL tables; instead, it maintains them on file systems. Companies can use data generated on the COBOL system to continue to communicate with the rest of the system at no risk. Sequential files also facilitate a secure migration path to advanced standards such as MS Excel. 

Modern systems offer companies a range of portfolio analysis that allows for narrowing down their scope of legacy application migration. Organizations may also capitalize on it to shed light on migration rules hidden in the ancient legacy environment. COBOL to C# modernization solution uses an extensible and fully maintainable code base to develop functional equivalent target application. Migration from COBOL solution to C# applications involves language translation, analysis of all artifacts required for modernization, system acceptance testing, and database and data transfer. While it’s optional, companies could need improvements such as coding improvements, SOA integration, clean up, screen redesign, and cloud deployment.

IT Outsourcing came to foray as a means for corporations to focus on critical business operations while having a specialized IT company take over the responsibility of managing the IT infrastructure and application development. For corporations especially in the developed countries, IT outsourcing provided two fold advantages, one was access to a highly talented pool of engineers and that too at a lower cost since countries like India were quickly growing their stature as an IT outsourcing hub.

IT Outsourcing is now as mainstream as ever and almost every leading organization outsources some or all parts of its IT infrastructure to a specialized company. It makes pure business sense and with tightening budget controls, IT outsourcing has become one of the strategic cost reduction driver for most organizations. Moreover, IT outsourcing is no more restricted to companies in USA & Europe outsourcing their IT projects to countries like India. Domestic companies within India itself actively use IT outsourcing including the Indian government like the India Post project given to TCS.

Is it then a no brainer that IT Outsourcing is critical to your business? Well, if it is cheaper and does not seem to have any inherent disadvantages why not!! Not really, IT Outsourcing despite proven benefits has its limitations and you should be cognizant be of the same before considering outsourcing your IT operations.

·         Limitations in estimating the actual cost of IT outsourcing:Let’s tackle the biggest driver of IT Outsourcing-Cost Savings. For anyone to estimate the cost savings from IT Outsourcing one needs to be able to predict the cost of outsourcing which then helps understand the cost savings from the same. Yes, at a higher level it is a matter of a simple $ per man-hour costs and IT outsourcing will appear to be cheaper in almost all cases. However, “hidden costs” are commonplace with IT outsourcing and it can be immensely difficult to accurately predict these hidden costs. For example, you need to be able to identify the costs of transitioning your in-house IT to an outsourcer, management overhead needed to manage the outsourcing relationship etc. In addition, IT outsourcing contracts are fixed at the start of the contract and as a result any additional requirement/change tends to be charged additionally. It is no surprise that IT requirements can change frequently and if your outsourcing contract doesn’t account for flexibility, you might be limited in the actual cost savings you might make. There is no surprise that there have been so many instances of IT outsourcing projects overshooting their budgets by a huge margin such as the one government shared services project going 500 million pounds over budget

Writing Python in Java syntax is possible with a semi-automatic tool. Programming code translation tools pick up about 75% of dynamically typed language. Conversion of Python to a statically typed language like Java requires some manual translation. The modern Java IDE can be used to infer local variable type definitions for each class attribute and local variable.


Translation of Syntax
Both Python and Java are OO imperative languages with sizable syntax constructs. Python is larger, and more competent for functional programming concepts. Using the source translator tool, parsing of the original Python source language will allow for construction of an Abstract Source Tree (AST), followed by conversion of the AST to Java.

Python will parse itself. This capability is exhibited in the ast module, which includes skeleton classes. The latter can be expanded to parse and source each node of an AST. Extension of the ast.NodeVisitor class enables python syntax constructs to be customized using translate.py and parser.py coding structure.

The Concrete Syntax Tree (CST) for Java is based on visit to the AST. Java string templates can be output at AST nodes with visitor.py code. Comment blocks are not retained by the Python ast Parser. Conversion of Python to multi-line string constructs with the translator reduces time to script.


Scripting Python Type Inference in Java
Programmers using Python source know that the language does not contain type information. The fact that Python is a dynamic type language means object type is determined at run time. Python is also not enforced at compile time, as the source is not specified. Runtime type information of an object can be determined by inspecting the __class__.__name__ attribute.

Python’s inspect module is used for constructing profilers and debugging.
Implementation of def traceit (frame, event, arg) method in Python, and connecting it to the interpreter with sys.settrace (traceit) allows for integration of multiple events during application runtime.

Method call events prompt inspect and indexing of runtime type. Inspection of all method arguments can be conducted. By running the application profiler and exercising the code, captured trace files for each source file can be modified with the translator. Generating method syntax can be done with the translator by search and addition of type information. Results in set or returned variables disseminate the dynamic code in static taxonomy.

The final step in the Python to Java scrip integration is to administer unsupported concepts such as value object creation. There is also the task of porting library client code, for reproduction in Java equivalents. Java API stubs can be created to account for Python APIs. Once converted to Java the final clean-up of the script is far easier.

Related:

 What Are The 10 Most Famous Software Programs Written in Python?

Python, a Zen Poem