We've heard about XML penetration into C#, Java and SQL. Now it seems like 45-years old programming language, 75% of worlds's business apps is written in is ready to adopt XML. I'm talking about Cobol, yeah baby! In the "XML and the New COBOL" article at webservicessummit.com Barry Tauber explains proposed forthcoming standard that will add native XML support to the Cobol language. IBM, HP and MicroFocus are behind this move, so chances are good.
And btw I'm currently working with Fujitsu NetCobol, which is .NET based Cobol and as such has full access to the .NET XML processing facilities. Not bad approach too!
If you need to integrate COBOL and XML, one solution is XML Thunder. This visual development tool allows the mapping of COBOL data strcutres to XML schema nodes (or DTDs) and will generate the complete COBOL source code needed to create or consume XML documents by COBOL busienss programs. It can be used under CICS, IMS and even in batch on mainframes, Unix and other midranges systems - really anywhere there is COBOL available.