Glossary
The technical and business terms used across this site, with permalinks for deep-linking.
- ACORD TXLife
- The insurance-industry XML standard for exchanging life and annuity data. Cobra can project captured product and rule configuration into ACORD TXLife 2.30 as a portable evidence pack.
- AS/400 (IBM i)
- IBM’s midrange platform (now IBM i, formerly AS/400) — distinct from the mainframe, and home to many long-running COBOL and RPG estates, including Life/400 insurance systems.
- BMS
- Basic Mapping Support — the IBM CICS system for defining mainframe terminal screens.
- CICS
- Customer Information Control System — IBM's mainframe transaction processing monitor.
- COBOL
- Common Business-Oriented Language — the lingua franca of mission-critical business systems on the mainframe.
- Cobra
- The Filix runtime platform — a real COBOL runtime integrated with modern .NET infrastructure.
- Dictionary MCP
- The Filix metadata server, exposed to AI agents through the Model Context Protocol (MCP) as a large set of specialised, read-only tools spanning COBOL, PL/I, HLASM and the supporting mainframe technologies.
- Epic Loop
- Filix’s autonomous governed delivery pipeline: a deterministic controller drives an AI “maker” to build validated test suites, at graded autonomy up to auto-merge, with a hard denylist and a fully auditable decision log.
- HLASM
- IBM High-Level Assembler — the low-level mainframe assembly language. Cobra supports it in the Dictionary MCP as a first-class analysis target, with 100%-by-construction coverage and provenance-tagged facts. Assembler is comprehended, not executed on the runtime.
- IMS / IMS/DB
- IBM Information Management System — a long-standing hierarchical database (IMS/DB) and transaction manager used across mainframe estates.
- JCL
- Job Control Language — the IBM mainframe convention for orchestrating batch jobs.
- Life/400
- A family of life-insurance policy-administration systems that run on IBM i (AS/400). In scope for Cobra’s analysis surface alongside mainframe estates.
- MCP
- Model Context Protocol — the open protocol Filix uses to expose authoritative metadata and tools to AI agents in a structured, governable way. See Dictionary MCP.
- MQ / MQSeries
- IBM messaging middleware (MQSeries, later WebSphere MQ / IBM MQ) — the messaging backbone of many mainframe estates.
- Mainframe
- High-end IBM hardware that still runs the core systems of many banks, insurers, and government agencies.
- Metadata server
- A purpose-built service that exposes the structure of a legacy estate to AI agents in a form they can reason from.
- Methodology
- The opinionated, layered approach Filix takes to AI-assisted modernisation. The methodology is part of the product.
- MIPS
- Millions of Instructions Per Second — the unit by which mainframe usage is typically billed.
- PL/I
- A long-standing IBM systems and applications language used alongside COBOL. On the Cobra platform PL/I is a delivered analysis capability — parsed and understood on the same Dictionary MCP surface as COBOL. It is not executed on the managed COBOL runtime (Rocket PL/I is unmanaged code); the coverage is comprehension, not execution.
- Rocket Visual COBOL
- The commercial COBOL execution runtime (from Rocket Software) that Cobra integrates with, so generated code and tests run against a real runtime rather than a simulation.
- Specification capture
- The Filix approach of extracting business rules from runtime behaviour, producing formal specifications and linked tests.