isCOBOL Mobile lets you run COBOL code on mobile devices. The goal is to reuse the existing backend COBOL logic as well as sequential, relative and indexed files (in JIsam format) on a mobile application while the UI is rewritten using a HTML5/CSS3 UI Framework such as jQuery Mobile or Dojo Mobile or Sencha Touch.

The code described in this book takes advantage of JQuery Mobile for the UI. You can find documentation about JQuery Mobile at http://view.jquerymobile.com/1.3.0/.

The COBOL program has to be transformed to a stateful REST WebService. This is done by an internal class that allows communication with HTML pages using AJAX to retrieve data and print results.

The UI is rendered on mobile devices using the WebView component available on Android ADT while the COBOL logic runs locally on the device thanks to the new Framework library provided along with isCOBOL Mobile. This library is compatible with Android version 7 or greater. It will interact with API functions on your mobile devices such as Phone Book, Memo, etc.