CNX Bolsters ‘Nitro’ Enhancements in IBM i Web Toolset

March 27, 2012 Alex Woodie

IBM i shops should see a boost of speed in their Web application development projects with the latest release of the Valence development toolset from CNX. Valence 3.1 introduces new members of the Nitro family of products to its IBM i customers, most notably the Nitro App Builder, which lets users build simple JavaScript dashboards without any coding. “It’s like training wheels for RPG programmers jumping into Web development,” a company spokesman says.

Valence is a collection of software for developing modern Web 2.0 and mobile applications that run on the IBM i platform and its Apache-powered Web server. The product includes a version of the Ext JS JavaScript library from Sencha, a set of RPG procedures for accessing existing IBM i business logic, and a Web portal framework that provides customers with pre-built navigation and security.

CNX unveiled its first Nitro product, the Nitro Source Editor, with last summer’s release of Valence 3.0. Now the Chicago-based company has added two products to the Nitro family, including the Nitro App Builder and the Nitro File Editor.

The Valence Nitro App Builder is designed to help developers create dashboards and query applications, and to do so very quickly. The product includes an array of pre-built charts, graphs, and tables that developers can connect to their IBM i data. No coding is required, and the finished applications are generated within minutes, although developers may choose to spend more time customizing their creations.

Richard Milone, CNX chief technical officer, says the Nitro App Builder is the biggest piece of news with Valence 3.1, as it brings new features in support of rapid Web application development on IBM i.

“This is not some sort of Web designer imported from another platform and shoe-horned into working on IBM i,” Milone says in a press release. “This was designed from scratch explicitly for IBM i and it performs incredibly fast.”

CNX plans to add more “bells and whistles” to Nitro App Builder in coming Valence releases, says Rob Swanson, a senior partner with CNX. One of the expected new features is “the integration of two-way communication so data entered or changed in the front-end interface can be sent to an RPG program (or directly to a database file) for processing on the back end, again without any front-end coding required.”

No programming is required to build charts like this in Nitro App Builder in Valence 3.1.

Another new feature with Valence 3.1 is the Nitro File Editor, which allows users to browse DB2/400 from the comfort of a Web browser. The tool allows users to view, add, update, and delete files in their database, and download to Excel. As one would expect from a tool built on a JavaScript grid, all columns are resizable and movable, enabling users to change their view of the database.

“This is a great tool for any IBM i developers or super users dealing with viewing or updating file data,” Swanson says. “I particularly like using it to peruse the results of journal receiver dumps. It makes navigating the huge volume of rows and columns a breeze.”

Valence 3.1 also includes the latest release of its JavaScript library, Ext JS 4.0.7, and also includes Sencha Touch 2.0.0 for developing touch-enabled apps on the iPad, the iPhone, and other mobile devices.

CNX says it’s seeing lots of interest in Valence from RPG developers due to its capability to deliver modern Web 2.0 interfaces like users get with Google and Facebook without a huge learning curve. “This is an exciting time for IBM i shops to be jumping into this kind of development, because the technology has come so far so fast in recent years,” Milone says. “It’s truly amazing what kind of apps you can develop for browsers these days, and once you get fluent in how it all works there’s practically no limit to what you can create.”

The Nitro App Builder and the Nitro File Editor are only available with the Enterprise version of Valence, which costs $4,995 per IBM i server. CNX also sells a Professional version of Valence, which costs $1,195 per developer. The Community Edition of Valence is free to download, but users must share their source code if they deploy a production Valence app. The Enterprise, Professional, and OEM versions allow developers to keep their source private.

CNX is formally launching Valence at the Spring RPG/DB2 Summit, which is being held this week in Fort Worth, Texas. For more information or free 90-day trials of Valence 3.1 Enterprise Edition, see the vendor’s website at www.cnxcorp.com.