Cobalt

Development

I implemented the project together with my fellow students Michael Rüegg, Mark Spörndli and Roger Waldvogel for the ?Software Engineering 2? course at HSR.

Detailed Description

Cobalt is a tool to inspect and visualize COBOL programs. After opening such a program Cobalt visualizes it in two different views. One of them is a traditional source code editor with syntax highlighting. The other and more important control displays a call-graph. This call-graph allows a developer to understand the structure of a program easily.

Technical Details

Additional Developers: Michael Rüegg, Mark Spörndli, Roger Waldvogel
Programming Language: C++
Development Environment: Microsoft Visual Studio.Net 2003
Project Size: 215 files, 24'537 code lines, 10'171 comment lines, 5'527 blank lines, 1.15 MiB code
Technology used: COBOL, CppUnit

Feature List

Open and parse a COBOL program
Display the call-graph of COBOL programs
Display syntax highlighted source of COBOL programs

Challenges

Cobalt was developed as part of a software engineering course. But the final target of the course was not the finished software, even though Cobalt is a useful application that with a bit of tuning, could be used in a professional environment. In this course the students should learn to work in large (thus the team consisted of five people) and to do all the documentation work involved in a professional manner. Thus the final product contained, besides the software, a project documentation of approximately 180 pages and a full website documenting the project. Therefore the main challenge of this project was to coordinate the team and to divide the workload equally without introducing delays caused by someone waiting for results of another team member.

Screenshots

A screenshot of Cobalt

Videos

Using Cobalt

Code Sample

The code sample shows the function used to parse a COBOL program. The numbers inside the comments refer to a document describing the syntactic structure of a COBOL program.

//-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
DEFINE_NONTERMINAL(parse_cobol_source_program)
{
	BEGIN_NONTERMINAL(ELEMENT_COBOL_SOURCE_PROGRAM);
	TOKEN_TYPES tokenChoice[] = { TOKEN_IDENTIFICATION, TOKEN_ID };

	// 1
	NEED_TOKENS(tokenChoice, 2);
	NEED_TOKEN(TOKEN_DIVISION);
	NEED_TOKEN(TOKEN_SIGN_DOT);
	NEED_NONTERMINAL(parse_program_id_cobol_source_program);

	// 2
	OPTIONAL_NONTERMINAL(parse_identification_division_content);

	// 3
	OPTIONAL_NONTERMINAL(parse_environment_division);

	// 4
	OPTIONAL_NONTERMINAL(parse_data_division);

	// 5
	OPTIONAL_NONTERMINAL(parse_procedure_division);

	// 6
	if (OPTIONAL_NONTERMINAL(parse_nested_cobol_source_program))
	{
		while (OPTIONAL_NONTERMINAL(parse_nested_cobol_source_program));
		NEED_TOKEN(TOKEN_END);
		NEED_TOKEN(TOKEN_PROGRAM);
		NEED_NONTERMINAL(parse_program_name);
		NEED_TOKEN(TOKEN_SIGN_DOT);
	}

	SUCCESS();
	return true;
}

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