Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition--BCD Gears Up for WebSmart 4.0, Ships New Catapult Release

When WebSmart 4.0 ships later this year or early next year, Business Computer Design Int'l says, users will find the integrated development toolset easier to use than that in previous versions. The software, which is in beta, will feature a variety of new wizards, templates, and other enhancements geared toward improving the user experience. News from BCD also includes an updated release of Catapult, its document management software for OS/400 servers.

In a world full of IT choices, BCD has found some success in selling ProGen WebSmart as an alternative to IBM's WebSphere development tools and the WebSphere Application Server. Since it was introduced several years ago, nearly 500 companies have adopted WebSmart to develop and serve Web applications that can run in the OS/400 server's batch subsystem and deliver fast access to DB2/400.

WebSmart is actually two products. The WebSmart integrated development environment (IDE) runs on a Windows PC and uses BCD's scripting language, called PML, to develop programs that can access, read, and write to native OS/400 applications. The WebSmart Web application server, meanwhile, executes WebSmart applications, which the integrated development environment generates either as RPG-CGI (WebSmart Original Edition) or as Java servlets (WebSmart Java Servlet Edition). In OS/400 land, most WebSmart users choose WebSmart Original Edition to generate CGI-based maintenance and inquiry programs that run in a Web browser and access their RPG systems; they choose it because RPG runs faster than Java on an OS/400 server.

With WebSmart 4.0, the company is aiming to streamline development and to improve the user experience, especially in the integrated development environment, which will feature an improved program creation wizard and new templates. These improvements will give programmers more options for controlling the behavior of Web pages, such as controlling the number of records displayed per page, and has an option to include add, change, or delete capabilities on a page.

Version 4.0 will also feature six new preconfigured template schemes, giving customers more options for controlling the look and feel of their Web site. The template schemes include names like "Business Blue," "Music Store," and "Plain Vanilla," and for each scheme, BCD offers various preconfigured page types, such as "single record maintenance" or "login page," to help development along. The new release will also support custom wizard screens, letting customers modify their programs with input fields, checkboxes, and drop-down boxes.

These enhancements should make users more productive with WebSmart 4.0, says Eric Figura, vice president of marketing for BCD. "A big part of 4.0 was the user experience," he says. "We expanded a lot of the IDE's wizard functionality and the custom templates."

There are several other major new features in WebSmart 4.0, however, such as integrated change management. Major change management software vendors such as Aldon Computer Group and SoftLanding Systems had already developed an interface to the WebSmart IDE. For companies without one of these enterprise-strength change management systems, however, BCD will provide basic check-in and check-out, modification tracking, and logging capabilities with WebSmart 4.0.

The new release will also integrate directly with e-mail servers. This has been the most-requested attribute among WebSmart users, BCD says, and with Version 4.0, the company is letting users connect their WebSmart applications to any SMTP e-mail server. These e-mail servers do not have to run on OS/400 servers, and will support HTML, attachments, and Cc and Bcc functions.

With Version 4.0, users will also be able to design their Web sites with a third-party HTML editor. BCD already offered an HTML editor with WebSmart and allowed HTML from other editors to be cut and pasted into WebSmart, but some functionality was lost in the translation. By allowing WebSmart to integrate directly with HTML editors, like Macromedia Dreamweaver, a company can make the best use of their employees' PC and OS/400 skills, Figura says. "iSeries staff are usually not familiar with anything about Web development. They're RPG people," he says. "Now you can introduce PC people to WebSmart, and they don't need to know the iSeries."

Rounding out the enhancements in WebSmart 4.0 are the following: PML color coding; customizable PML snippets; support for PML contexts in HTML; intelligent segment previews; automatic hot-key segment preview; a menu option to launch new sessions from existing ones; and new user validation functions using iSeries user names and passwords.

BCD recently started shipping a new release of its spool file distribution utility, Catapult 4.1. The company says it has improved the "intelligent routing" capabilities that it introduced with Catapult 4.0, earlier this year. For example, Catapult can now scan forward though a report to attach multiple segments of a spool file into a single e-mail. "Rather than sending five e-mails, Catapult will send you one e-mail with five attachments," says Darrell Jackson, lead developer of Catapult.

With this release, users can also just send links to a document archived on the Web, instead of sending the entire document, which could raise bandwidth and storage issues when many large documents are involved. Finally, BCD has improved Catapult's auditing capabilities with this release. Now every request or action taken in Catapult is logged in detail, providing access to e-mail, fax, printing, and archival processes from the Catapult history list. There is also a new real-time view for monitoring the progress of an executing process.

Catapult can be deployed with Nexus, a preconfigured Web portal product that BCD developed from its WebSmart technology. (BCD is giving free licenses to Nexus, as long as a maintenance agreement is purchased.) With the trio of Nexus, Catapult, and WebSmart, BCD has a set of infrastructure tools that it believes address many of the issues related to application- and document-access that affect OS/400 shops.

"It's a technology-versus-solution issue," Figura says. "Consultants love solutions, because you need to have them customized. We can provide solutions, if you want, but 90 percent of our clients do their own work."

Catapult licenses range from $2,750 to $6,000. WebSmart ranges from about $6,500 to $19,000. Nexus is free to the first 1,000 companies who request it. For more information and for trial downloads, go to www.bcdsoftware.com.

This article has been corrected since it was first published. BCD is letting users connect their WebSmart applications to any SMTP e-mail server, not to any SNMP e-mail server. Guild Companies regrets the error. [Correction made 11/4/03.]