Cybele Software Updates Legacy Modernization Tools

by Alex Woodie

Cybele Software recently launched a new version of its TN Bridge Integration Pack product that allows organizations to Web-enable and reuse their legacy 5250 and 3270 applications as Web services. TN Bridge Integration Pack Version 3.0, which the Delaware software company officially introduced in December, adds new components for Web-enabling legacy applications using the latest Microsoft .NET and Borland Delphi development tools.

Cybele Software was founded in 2002 and is based in Wilmington, Delaware. It's the North American affiliate of Team Soft S.R.L., a Buenos Aires, Argentina, software developer that has been in the AS/400 business since 1993. About 70 percent of Cybele Software's customers are in North America and include Bloomberg Financial Markets, Boeing, East Kodak Company, Goodyear, Rochester (New York) Gas and Electric, Toronto Transit, West Coast Life Insurance, and Bank Boston, says Max Goijarts, Cybele Software's business development manager in Wilmington.

Cybele's flagship product, TN Bridge Integration Pack, provides a series of components for accessing and working with 5250 and 3270 screens from the Microsoft Visual Studio and Borland Delphi integrated development environments. The company says developers don't need much training to begin building Web- or Windows-based GUIs from 5250 or 3270 screens using TN Bridge Integration Pack, or integrating these legacy applications with Windows applications.

TN Bridge Integration Pack is broken down into three components, including the mainframe access controls, terminal emulation, and "helper controls." The mainframe access controls provide standard Telnet access, including support for 80 or 132 columns and device naming, user names, and passwords for OS/400 applications. The emulator component provides PC functions, such as control over fonts, attributes, copy and paste, key mapping, macros, and inclusion of session status bar.

TN Bridge's helper controls provide the programmatic interface for automating navigation sequences and providing an XML interface on top of the emulation layer. There is also a separate program called the Development Lab, which provides a tracking and testing environment for TN Bridge applications. Developers can see exactly what's happening in their TN Bridge applications using one of three modes, including interactive, on-line trace, and off-line trace.

With TN Bridge Integration Pack Version 3.0, Cybele started using the Open Host Interface Objects API to access the IBM data streams, which protects customers' investment in the code. Customers can still use the older proprietary access method the product relied on before, if they choose.

The new version also has new XML Broker and XML Client components, which, Cybele says, enables any legacy screen to be converted into an XML document and allows "remote streaming" of 3270 and 5250 connections. There is also a new line printer daemon (LPD) component issued with this release that provides SCS support for IBM 3287 and 3812 printer emulation.

Cybele also says TN Bridge Integration Pack has been .NET-enabled with this release, and now supports the Visual Basic, VB.NET, C#, ASP, and ASP.NET components of Microsoft's Visual Studio integrated development environment. Cybele's product now also has support for the latest Borland integrated development environment, Delphi 2005 in Win32 mode, and now supports Borland Delphi 6 through the latest Delphi 2005 release.

Two versions of TN Bridge Integration Pack are available, one for Microsoft's ActiveX technology, and another for Delphi. Pricing start at about $800, which includes one developer license and five runtime licenses, to about $2,000, which includes five developer licenses and 25 runtime licenses. Additional runtime licenses can be purchased for between $15 and $35 each, depending on quantity. For more information, go to www.cybelesoft.com.