Surround Tech Touts Silverlight Deployment for Web Portal

Published: November 10, 2009

by Alex Woodie

The folks at Sherrill Furniture are singing the praise of a new dealer Web portal developed using software from Surround Technology. The company used Surround Tech's Accelerator for .NET software to augment a System i application with a front-end built using Microsoft Silverlight technology.

Surround Tech launched Accelerator for .NET earlier this year as the latest in a series of packaged offerings designed to speed up Web development for LANSA customers. The software does the low-level grunt work involved in generating the necessary code to deploy Silverlight and .NET applications, thereby allowing LANSA developers to concentrate on core skills.

As a longtime user of IBM midrange gear, Sherrill Furniture is no stranger to RPG. The company, which is based in Hickory, North Carolina, has been modernizing its applications using LANSA tools, including the Windows-oriented Visual LANSA. For several years, Sherrill Furniture has been using Surround Tech products to generate Windows interfaces from its LANSA applications.

Now it's using Accelerator for .NET launched to generate the most advanced, feature-rich Windows interfaces yet, using Silverlight. Silverlight, of course, is a Web application framework that provides a single runtime for integrating nifty things like multimedia, graphics, animations, and interactivity. It is commonly compared to Adobe's Flash.

The combination of LANSA and the System i on the backend and Silverlight and .NET on the front-end has worked well for the new dealer Web portal Sherrill Furniture developed.

"This is a huge improvement over the last site," says Woody Williams, COO of Sherrill Precedent Division. "It looks sensational, delivers substantial performance gains, and produces more data-rich screens for the users."

Reaction from users has been so positive that Sherrill Furniture has moved up plans to shut down the old dealer portal, which was developed in LANSA Web Access Modules (WAMs), Surround Tech says.

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