IBM Delivers Rational Migration Extension for Rich UI

Published: December 15, 2009

by Alex Woodie

System i and System z shops that are modernizing their 5250 and 3270 green-screen applications using IBM's Rational Business Developer (RBD) development tool and Enterprise Generation Language (EGL) may want to check out a new plug-in released last week by IBM. With the new Rational Migration Extension for Rich UI, IBM is helping customers ensure that the Web GUIs they create with RBD 7.5.1 are generated correctly as JavaScript and execute as expected.

Ever since IBM shipped the 7.5.1 release of RBD last fall that added "rich user interface" generation capabilities, Big Blue's development tool programmers have been gulping down the Web 2.0 Kool-Aid, and all the AJAX, HTML, and JavaScript that entails. IBM is even at times resembling a company a tenth its age and a hundredth its size by offering a free Web 2.0 development tool called EGL Community Edition, which IBM has positioned against free or inexpensive PHP tooling.

It may be hard to imagine, but IBM seems downright giddy about the prospects of creating "rich user interfaces," particularly among the big, conservative System i and System z shops that rely upon green-screen applications to run their businesses. That is why IBM appears to want to get the rich user interface design components right, and that's why it launched Rational Migration Extension for Rich UI last week.

With IBM Rational Migration Extension for Rich UI, IBM is basically delivering a framework that allows customers who have previously modernized their 5250 or 3270 green screens with the rich UI capabilities of RBD 7.5.1 to continue to maintain and enhance their new screens, without worrying too much about breaking the application.

Specifically, IBM sees customers using Rational Migration Extension for Rich UI to help them add third-party widgets, such as the range of charts and graphs offered through the Dojo Toolkit or other JavaScript-based widgets. As customers venture out into these open-source waters and experiment with widgets, Rational Migration Extension for Rich UI is there to keep everything working.

This is not the first Rational Migration Extension plug-in offered by IBM. In June 2008 it announced Rational Migration Extension for IBM i, which does prep work for transforming RPG into Java or COBOL code as part of the EGL transformation. IBM also offers Migration Extensions for the Adabase relational database, the Natural programming language, and, as of last week, CA's Cool:Gen 4GL tools for Unix and mainframe.

For more information on the Rational Migration Extension for Rich UI, see U.S. Software Announcement 209-375.

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