Dancerace Taps CNX for i/OS Screen Modernization

June 22, 2010 Alex Woodie

Dancerace, a UK provider of i/OS applications and data processing services, will utilize the Valence framework from CNX when it modernizes the next release of its flagship financial application.

Based in the city of Bath, Dancerace has been a strident supporter of the i/OS platform since it launched C3 in 1994. The company is bluntly honest on its Web site that C3, which is used by many the UK’s factoring and invoice discounting companies, is not a “Windows or so-called ‘thick client’ package that will make do for now and look pretty, but not really work reliably, or scale up successfully.”

Indeed, in the 16 years that C3 has been on the market, no customers has had a day of downtime, the company claims. “We don’t want you to confuse reliability with being old-fashioned,” the company says on its website.” This is worth your investment, and will develop constantly and safely to meet market challenges.”

While the 5250 green screen through which C3 is accesses is reliable, it is unnecessarily old-fashioned. Dancerace, like all ISVs, must balance the need to look modern without compromising the integrity of the underlying system.

This is where CNX comes in. CNX develops a framework designed to create Web 2.0 interfaces for i/OS applications developed in RPG. Valence, as the framework is called, provides a way to access RPG applications from Web interfaces based on Ext JS, the modern and open source JavaScript library.

Dancerace will use Valence to create modern interfaces and a modern portal for the upcoming release of C3 version 5, which is due by the end of the year.

Anthony Avison, Dancerace’s CEO, is looking forward to seeing what Valence can do. “We’ve created some fantastic interfaces over the years using RPG and green-screen technology–in fact taken it to the limits,” Avison says in a press release. “But there’s only so far you can take the green screen. A rich browser interface is the clear choice going forward, and Valence gives us an excellent technology base for fusing our powerful RPG back-end business logic with a robust, rich, and user-friendly front end.”

Avison expects to use Valence to add some “user-empowering” features in C3, such as wizards and dashboards. “I expect these enhancements will be very well received by C3 users,” he says.