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Software-Development

Checking in the Gradle Wrapper or Not?

·4 mins
The gradle wrapper can download and verify a specified version of gradle for a project without the need of a local gradle executable. The gradle documentation suggests to check it into the VCS (version control system, e.g. git). This article discusses the advantages and disadvantages of keeping the gradle wrapper in a VCS and presents an alternative.

COBOL in 2020? Try it on your PC!

COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented [programming] Language) dates back to 1959, and is still used in its realm of business software, mostly on mainframe computers. Of course, there are also many related software modernization and migration projects. Thus, once in a while even non-mainframe developers might need some COBOL knowledge. Commercial COBOL systems, especially on real mainframes, are expensive. In this article I demonstrate how to set up the GnuCOBOL compiler and integrate it with Visual Studio Code on Ubuntu Linux, but it also works on Windows and macOS. This way, experimenting with COBOL becomes easy and cheap.