IBM has announced its latest offering, Watsonx Code Assistant for Z, a generative AI-powered product designed to expedite the translation of COBOL to Java on the ‘IBM Z’ platform, ultimately boosting developer productivity. Set to become generally available in the fourth quarter of 2023, this tool is geared toward accelerating COBOL application modernization.
Kareem Yusuf, PhD, Senior Vice President of Product Management and Growth at IBM Software, explained that Watsonx Code Assistant for Z is engineered for precision. It is built to swiftly and accurately convert code optimized for IBM Z, reducing time to market and expanding the pool of skilled developers.
IBM’s Watson Code Assistant simplifies the coding process by providing AI-generated recommendations to assist developers. It leverages generative AI and automated tooling to support mainframe application modernization, preserving the performance, security, and resilience attributes of IBM Z.
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This product is specifically designed to refactor, transform, and validate COBOL code, speeding up the time-to-value and enhancing capabilities for essential application modernization on IBM Z.
It relies on a 20 billion-parameter large language model (LLM) for code processing.
COBOL, a widely used data processing language, plays a critical role in numerous business and operational processes worldwide. By employing Watsonx Code Assistant for Z, developers can more easily and incrementally transform COBOL business services into well-architected, high-quality Java code compared to other methods.
Generative AI empowers developers to efficiently assess, update, validate, and test code, enabling them to modernise large applications more swiftly while concentrating on higher-impact tasks. IBM’s Watsonx Code Assistant for Z represents a significant step forward in COBOL-to-Java translation and mainframe application enhancement.
