Finding the Right Velocity for Web Enablement

by Alex Woodie

Brian McMenamy is a development manager with Velocity and was involved in writing the company's Web-enablement software, which eventually came to be called LegacyWeb. About two years ago, the company started looking for Web-enablement software that could take the Solar Tech ERP system to the Internet.

"We were looking for something that we could run on the '400 that wasn't a screen scraper and wasn't a rewrite into another language that we would have to learn," he said. "We looked at about 12 products, running the gamut . . . . We looked at everything."

What Solar Tech wanted was a tool that was flexible enough to work with the variety of ways in which customers configure and use the Solar Tech ERP applications, which are used across different industries. At the same time, the company wanted something that was durable and sophisticated enough to handle large interactive applications, with lots of input and output, while continuing to support existing message files, subfiles, and keywords. The company looked at the offerings of some well-known application rejuvenation vendors, but wasn't impressed.

"The first bunch of products we looked at were screen scrapers, but it looked horrible, and it didn't work very well," McMenamy said. "The second group is what I would call 'advanced screen scrapers.'" These provided more functionality, but they couldn't handle the interactive data-entry demands of mission-critical applications, he said. The last group of development tools on Solar Tech's list--the third- and fourth- generation languages--would have cost the company upward of $50,000 for a developer's licenses out of the gate, and probably much more in services over the long term.

Since Solar Tech couldn't find the sort of industrial-strength tool it was looking for, and it would have cost a bundle to hire a vendor to custom build it, the company really had no other option but to develop the Web- enabling application in-house. They called it LegacyWeb.

LegacyWeb was written in ILE RPG. Basically, it automatically finds specific pieces of code in RPG and COBOL applications that describe how data is to be displayed in a green-screen interface, and replaces that code with directions to display the data in a Web browser. By converting the DDS to HTML, LegacyWeb also allows the application to run in a batch environment, instead of the interactive environment, which is a much more expensive workload to support on an AS/400 or iSeries. In fact, LegacyWeb allows users to choose whether to use interactive (green screen) or batch (Web browser) modes with their applications that have been converted with the LegacyWeb software.

LegacyWeb is composed of three components for converting, administering, and serving applications from the OS/400 platform. After running the application through the LegacyWeb converter, the user works with a layout template to position all of the Web elements, including text, images, logos, links, combo boxes, radio buttons, cascading style sheets, tables, borders, graphics, Java script, and Visual Basic script. All of the components install only on OS/400, although companies can use PC-based HTML editors, such as Dreamweaver, to change the look and feel of their LegacyWeb-powered Web applications if they want.

The current LegacyWeb version that's shipping is Version 3.0. Velocity is testing--and plans to start shipping later this summer--the follow-on version, which will support XML and XSL data. For more information, visit www.myvelocity.net.