Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

SEAGULL last week introduced a new way to develop and deliver GUI applications for iSeries and zSeries servers. The new product, LegaSuite Web Services Studio, provides a visual drag-and-drop environment that catalogs business processes, models new workflows, then generates the GUI and the application code, which is executed as a Microsoft ASP.NET application. SEAGULL officials say it's a good way to build new graphical applications for database-driven applications residing on OS/400 servers.

With its basis in XML and its Microsoft Visio-like visual workflow editor, LegaSuite Web Services Studio 2.0 represents what SEAGULL sees as the new application development paradigm, in which expense and complexity are the enemies, and standards allow applications to be built on top of each other like so many electronic Lincoln Logs.

Andre den Haan, vice president of product strategy at the Atlanta company, says the fact that business analysts can create composite applications using Web Services Studio makes the product evolutionary. "You can program your way through anything," he says. "But what needs to be done is a new approach to speed things up and have normal human beings create applications for businesses. Web Services Studio is the next iteration of a trend we see in the fundamentals of application development."

That's not to say that there's no place for programmers in Web Services Studio, or the world of Web services in general. To build new composite applications from iSeries assets, Web Services Studio requires another product in SEAGULL's LegaSuite stack, Transidiom, to transform the 5250 data stream into XML and Web Services Description Language (WSDL). Transidiom is still primarily a programmer's tool. But once that work has been done and the OS/400 business process has been redefined in the "services oriented" architecture of XML, the business analysts are free to roam.

Web Services Studio also can be used to assemble composite Web services applications where no legacy applications exist--a first for SEAGULL, which has historically focused on the legacy extension market.

Jason Hamlin, chief technology officer at Nexsys and one of the beta testers of Web Services Studio, agrees that getting the responsibility of application development out of the programmer's hands and into the hands of the business analysts is a good thing. "It's going to be a lot faster to develop and deploy applications when you sit down with somebody who knows the process. You don't have to go away for three months and code," he says. "All you need to understand in Web Services Studio is the process. You don't have to understand programming."

Web Services Studio's similarity to Visio, the popular Microsoft modeling tool, is one of the bonuses of the product, Hamlin says. "It's drag-and-drop. I'm using the same APIs in ASP.NET, and it auto-generates the code for me. It pretty much connects all the dots," he says. Web Services Studio differs from Visio in one very important respect, however: Visio doesn't generate code; whereas Web Services Studio generates ASP.NET code that runs on Microsoft's IIS Web server. Using the ASP.NET API gives Web Services Studio the capability to interoperate with other ASP.NET applications, no matter the environment used to develop them.

LegaSuite Web Services Studio has four modules. There's an importing module that helps to catalog the Web services and the transactions that will be the building blocks of the new Web application. The flow designer provides a visual environment for modeling the business process across multiple services and transactions. A layout designer provides pre-built themes and templates for customizing the generated user interface. At runtime, the publishing module generates ASP.NET code and deploys the application to a Microsoft IIS server.

In the future, SEAGULL plans to support the creation of composite Java-based Web services with its Web Services Studio, among other languages, den Haan says, conjuring up images of a fourth-generation language (4GL). Transidiom already supports the transformation of 5250 data into Java components, and considering that Web Services Studio stores flow and layout definitions as XML metadata, SEAGULL is well positioned to add code generators for other Web services languages, such as Java. What's more important, SEAGULL officials say, is customer demand. The general perception in the market is that Microsoft's Web Services development tools are easier to work with than IBM's WebSphere tools. Analysts and software vendors agree that this disparity is fueling a shift toward Microsoft tools for development of e-business applications in small and midsized businesses, including AS/400 and iSeries shops.

SEAGULL's den Haan says Web Services Studio provides an excellent way to build new GUI front-ends to OS/400 applications. He says it fits in well with the gradual repurposing of the AS/400 and iSeries line as a database server, where the application logic is stored on the OS/400 server but the presentation layer is offloaded to another technology.

SEAGULL sees Web Services Studio being used among its end-user customers as well as its ISV customers. For example, considering that 80 percent of the cost of installing new software involves implementation-related costs, Web Services Studio's capability to optimize and tune an application to meet a particular customer's needs should find use among the ISVs and solution providers, den Haan says.

Web Services Studio 2.0 is available now. Pricing begins at $5,000 per development seat. For more information, go to www.seagullsw.com.