Cobol may be the language we all love to hate but it is still important in the "real" world.  MicroFocus seems to be doing its best to bring Cobol into the modern world - and to the cloud.

With an estimated 220 billion lines of Cobol code in active use in business and finance applications today, Cobol systems are still powering more than 70 percent of the world's businesses. So although you may want to think that it's gone and long forgotten, it is the real meaning of "legacy system".

With the launch of Visual Cobol R3 the language has been updated to make it easier for C# and Java programmers to use, so bringing Cobol into the 21st century.

The latest version of MicroFocus Visual Cobol gives developers a choice of IDE - Eclipse as well as Visual Studio 2010 - and adds the ability to publish Cobol applications to an Azure cloud so creating scalable systems without the need to invest in "mainframe" hardware.

Visual Cobol R3 also includes a capability to run on a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) so allowing Cobol to coexist with Java systems and to adopt some of the write once run anywhere properties of Java.

It also introduces the Visual Cobol Development Hub, a tool for remote Linux and Unix servers which permits remote group development.

For more information on new features for developers, view the video: