Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

LANSA continued its transformation into a multiplatform development tools vendor last month, when it announced the 10.0 release of its core 4GL, or fourth-generation language, application development technology. The Downers Grove, Illinois, company now supports, for the first time, the Red Hat Linux and Sun Solaris operating systems with its software, and has expanded its existing support for Microsoft Windows.

It's worthy to note which new technologies LANSA chooses to incorporate into its software because its livelihood and longevity, as a 4GL tools provider, is tied more closely to the satisfaction of its customer base than most other types of software companies. LANSA's customers have invested thousands of dollars and man-hours in learning LANSA's language as an insurance policy of sorts against the changing seas of technology, platforms, and programming languages. When LANSA builds support for a new technology into its 4GL environment, it gives LANSA users a leg up on incorporating that technology into their applications, compared with other shops that must build that support themselves from scratch. That's the value proposition of 4GLs in general, and LANSA has been more successful at it than any other 4GL vendor on the OS/400 platform.

At the same time, LANSA, as a company, is continually evaluating what direction it should take to keep its technology the most viable and to attract new users and independent software vendors. For the past few years, LANSA has had a two-pronged strategy. First, it continued to build support for operating systems besides OS/400. Second, it continued its transformation from a strictly programming tools vendor into a vendor of practical applications with a great set of accompanying development tools. LANSA 10.0, announced last month and due to ship in the first quarter of 2003, continues that strategy.

Bill Hood, director of marketing at LANSA, says LANSA 10.0 allows for rapid integration of different systems and the capability to augment emerging technologies with existing applications. "LANSA Version 10.0 includes significant enhancements, functionality, and support that will assist our customers in taking advantage of leading-edge solutions capable of deployment across multiple platforms," he says.

With the 10.0 release, LANSA has expanded the platforms supported for the Web server tier of LANSA for the Web, the company's environment for development of Web and wireless applications. With 10.0, LANSA adds Red Hat Linux and Sun Microsystems Solaris as supported platforms for the Web server tier. The entire list of supported Web servers now includes Red Hat Linux 7.1 Professional Server running Apache or Tomcat, Sun Solaris 7, Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX 11.0, or IBM's AIX 4.3.3 running Apache or Tomcat, OS/400 running WebSphere, Apache, or Tomcat, and Windows running IIS.

LANSA for the Web 10.0 also now supports multiple instances of the Visual LANSA runtime environment, allowing users to, say, have one LANSA 9.1 application running concurrently with one or more 10.0 applications on the same server. However, you still have to choose to deploy using either Microsoft's technology or the Java servlet technology, but not both. Similarly, you can now have more than one version of LANSA Open, a LANSA development environment for rapidly rolling out Windows and Java applications, installed on a single machine.

LANSA also built a new interface for its e-Business Frameworks, a set of components that ships with LANSA for the Web, and which includes pre-built programs such as Order Transaction and Extended Search. LANSA says the new e-Business Framework Wizard interface includes features such as simplified layouts, better control of layout definitions, and support for DHTML menus and Cascading Style Sheets.

Users can now deploy their LANSA Integrator application on Windows servers with the 10.0 release. LANSA Integrator, announced in the fall of 2001, uses XML and Java Services technologies to allow companies to send and receive messages to and from a variety of platforms. This release also has EDI support, including support for EDI X12 and EDIFACT.

Visual LANSA, the company's premiere client-server development environment for OS/400, Unix, Red Hat Linux, and Windows, has also been enhanced with this release. First, the Visual LANSA Framework now provides an object authority system that can be used to prevent users from accessing the framework, server, applications, or LANSA business objects. The Visual Modeler component of Visual LANSA now supports drag-and-drop capabilities for creating entities and building relationships between entities.

These are just some of the hundreds of enhancements that LANSA has built into LANSA 10.0. For the complete product-by-product list of 10.0 enhancements, see the LANSA press release (scroll down to the links at the bottom of the page).