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Internet's Domain Names Continuing to Multiply

Posted on: Wednesday, 21 September 2005, 06:00 CDT

Dear Propeller Heads: The other day I received a link from a friend directing me to whitney.nyc.museum, and I thought for certain it was bogus because the URL didn't end with something I recognized. Yet it worked! What's up with .museum?

A: It isn't your parents' Internet anymore. This is the kinder, gentler Internet where the cryptic two- and three-letter top-level domain names are being enhanced with an eclectic collection of, well, even more cryptic domain names.

To get everybody up to speed, a top-level domain (or TLD, as we say in the biz) is the group of letters that appears after the last period in any e-mail address or Web address. There are more than 200 two-letter TLDs, one for each country in the world (such as .us, .uk, .de, .es).

In addition, there are 15 other TLDs. When the Internet started up, there were only seven -- .com, .edu, .gov, .int, .mil, .net and .org. There also was .arpa, but figuring out what that is reserved for is about as easy as understanding the "Matrix" sequels.

Because .com quickly became miscellaneous for all intents and purposes, it was decided in 2000 to offer seven more TLDs to ease the struggle for .com addresses. These seven are an interesting bunch -- .aero, .biz, .coop, .info, .museum, .name and .pro.

A few of these, such as .name for individual people and .pro for professionals, I understand and accept without argument. They haven't caught on, but that doesn't diminish their validity in my opinion.

But where I get lost is .biz. Isn't that just a second-class .com? And how does the aerospace industry get a domain just for itself? They and the museum lobbyists must have quite a bit of pull with Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (www.icann.org), the international organization that decides what the alphabet soup of TLDs looks like.

But hold on to your hats, because nine more TLDs may be on their way before you can say .ohno. These are .asia, .cat, .jobs, .mail, .mobi, .post, .tel, .travel and the most infamous of all -- .xxx (for adult sites).

Most of these are again trying to specialize .com addresses and should start popping up on the Internet within a year.

I imagine more TLDs will make an appearance in the years to come. The ones I'm looking forward to are .team (sports teams), .movie (movie homepages), .esperanto (because .cat would open the door for any language) and .nomoretopleveldomains (self-explanatory).

And if all this doesn't make any sense, don't blame .me.

Dear Propeller Heads: I am a 40-ish COBOL programmer. Twenty years ago, I was a hot commodity. Now I feel as outdated as a VCR. Can I still program COBOL until retirement?

A: OK, if we're going to be honest, you haven't seen 40 for at least a decade. So, the good news is that while COBOL might not be on the fast track in IT development, you don't need to work that many more years.

Experts have been predicting the death of COBOL for years.

It's a bit like that old man in the Monty Python movie: The language is "not dead yet" and, in fact, is "feeling better."

Here are some COBOL facts I found from the Gartner Group (www.gartnergroup.com):

*Roughly 75 percent of all business data is processed in COBOL.

*Between 180 billion and 200 billion lines of COBOL code are in use worldwide.

*About 15 percent of all new applications (5 billion lines of code) through 2005 will be in COBOL.

*Changes in the COBOL standards now regularly include object- oriented constructs.

So, your real question is: What is the future of this venerable language?

There is an awful lot of legacy software running just fine using COBOL with no sign of replacement anytime soon. With Java, C#, Ruby and other nice languages ready to replace this ancient stuff, the question is why isn't it happening?

One reason is that the software is running fine. Rewriting the software just to be using a newer language is not usually smart.

Also, a lot of the COBOL out there supports online systems that, while not pretty, keep the ranks of corporate America very productive.

In other words, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Another reason is the programming magic (business logic) in some of that COBOL code is tough to translate into other languages. That's because it is often undocumented and complicated.

So, many companies tack modern front-end systems to this software while running the old stuff under the covers (propeller speak). This actually works pretty well.

Someone needs to maintain this stuff, so you might stay busy until you retire. You have to decide if that's what you want to do.

Ed Yourdon, one of the old technology pioneers, has been quoted as saying "COBOL maintenance programming is considered a pleasant alternative to growing rice or raising pigs."

So what's the prognosis, you ask -- even though you know I'm not a doctor.

Recently, COBOL has been given some new life. There is now a COBOL compiler for .net. This allows us to write some Web applications using good ol' COBOL instead of VB or C#.

Also, Microsoft has teamed up with Micro Focus (www.microfocus.com) on a new strategy called lift and shift.

At first, I thought this involved some kind of cosmetic surgery. But actually, it means taking COBOL applications running on IBM mainframes and porting them along with their data to Windows servers running the Micro Focus mainframe emulation suite.

Pretty cool, huh? It opens up the applications to easier migration to the Web and takes some very expensive computing resources (IBM's) and replaces them with cheaper ones (Wintel).

So you might want to find a company that plans to "lift and shift" their legacy applications to the Web.

When the Propeller Heads at Data Directions Inc. aren't busy with their IT projects, they love to answer questions on business or consumer technology. Send your questions to questions@askthepropellerheads.com. Or, contact them at Data Directions, 201 Concourse Blvd., Suite 110, Glen Allen, VA 23059 or at (804) 270-2426.

Source: Richmond Times - Dispatch

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