LANSA Announces New Modernization Tool

Published: March 28, 2006

by Mary Lou Roberts

Modernization. Most iSeries shops need it. Few are doing it. And those green screens keep chugging away while gnashing of teeth and the wringing of hands goes on. With tight budgets, managers are striving to find the tools and resources to move the company forward.

There's a real dilemma here, points out Greg Best, vice president of sales for LANSA. A recent survey of iSeries shops showed 42 percent of those responding placed modernization of their applications as their highest priority. At the same time, 72 percent acknowledged they haven't even begun to make a commitment to a modernization plan.

Perhaps that's because the two primary alternatives haven't been attractive ones: reface, or rebuild. There are plenty of refacing tools on the market, says Best--and, in fact, LANSA offers one of its own. "They can provide a GUI rather quickly, and they can do some pretty fancy stuff. But they are really just adding graphics, not changing the application navigation. It's a dead-end solution. After you reface, you still have a 5250 application. This is especially a problem for ISVs, since you can't really sell that to the marketplace."

The alternative has been to rebuild. While technically superior in the long run, this approach is much more costly and time consuming.

LANSA is now providing a third alternative with the release of RAMP (Rapid Application Modernization Process), which will be available for shipment in the summer of 2006.

RAMP provides a staged approach to modernization that allows iSeries users to reface legacy applications while simultaneously preparing them for future redevelopment.

RAMP has three distinct stages. In stage one, the user defines a working prototype of and strategy for the modernized application, resulting in an application framework that subsequently will evolve in stages two and three. Wizards help a business analyst or expert user to design this prototype by creating a list of "business objects" that end users will work with.

Stage two adds the navigation and integrates the existing programs with the new framework on the iSeries. The Application Navigation Assistant is used to explore and store the various navigation paths through the iSeries within the application framework. At execution time, the recorded navigation paths are used to replace hierarchical menus with a point-and-click interface and the 5250 screens are dynamically styled with a Windows look and feel. As each reanimated screen is snapped into the application framework, access to real data and functionality is added. No programming is necessary.

Once the application has been wrapped in the application framework, it can be enriched with Visual LANSA components to deliver additional functionality such as e-mail and desktop integration. The result, at this point, is a modernized iSeries application running inside LANSA. At this point, you can deploy. David Brault, LANSA's product marketing manager, notes, "You now have the ability to plug your original applications into the framework without giving up any of the navigation, functionality, or behavior that you designed in the first stage. You have a modern application that's a mixture of both your legacy application and new components"

Other products on the market may be able to get you this far, but RAMP stage three takes the modernization process to its true conclusion. In stage three, LANSA 2005 is used to progressively replace 5250-based screens with platform-independent LANSA components to produce a modern, repository-based LANSA application that can run on iSeries, Windows, Unix, or Linux platforms. At this point, the system architecture can be adapted to support new technologies, such as Web services and design patterns, including SOA and AJAX. "In the end, you can eventually cut your tie with the old application," says Brault.

How much time and effort does it take to do all this? John Siniscal, president of LANSA America, says "the feedback from our early beta sites is that they can successfully convert 25 to 50 green screens per day into the RAMP environment ready for deployment, depending on the skills and experience of the business analyst doing the work and the complexity of the system being converted. Hence, a 1,000-screen application could be completed in as a little as four weeks by one analyst. This is after the stage one prototype has been created, which typically takes several days per system once the analyst is familiar with the RAMP process."

Best points out that RAMP will buy users time. "They know that they want new applications, and they probably don't want to rewrite; they probably want to buy. If they are under pressure to deliver something now, RAMP will buy them that time, and it will allow them to evolve their applications."

This product will, perhaps, be especially attractive to ISVs who are stuck marketing old technology and for whom purchase of a new application is not an option. In their case, RAMP will move their products forward while they determine when and how to redevelop.

iSeries users have not been known for any tendencies to leap into whatever is the hot technology of the moment. Indeed, their collective tendencies to be quite satisfied with the stability and reliability of their applications and the iSeries platform itself has left many shops with aging legacy systems that have now simply run out of gas in their ability to keep up with today's global, supply-chain, Internet-based, interactive world. Hence, the acknowledgement by many that modernization is (or should be) the highest priority. But where to begin--especially when resources are tight?

Siniscal responds: "RAMP is designed to be a process with no throw-away stages or dead-end paths. The sequencing, development effort, and pace of change are your decisions, and, therefore, the cost/benefit ratio is always under your control. LANSA provides the entire set of enabling tools and technology in one solution package. The result is a fully modernized iSeries application--built with your vision, in your timeframe, and with your existing resources."