Visual LANSA Customers Can Now ‘Portalize’ Their Apps
September 2, 2020 Alex Woodie
LANSA is well known to IBM i shops for its low-code developer tools. But the company also has its share of shrink-wrapped applications. With the recent launch of pre-build Web portal called Portalize, it’s added another to its collection.
Portalize is a portal framework that Visual LANSA customers can use to get a secure Web portal up and running with a minimal amount of effort. The product, which LANSA introduced in June, supplies the core components that an organization would need to get a portal off the ground, such as security, account creation, authentication, and logging capabilities.
The software, which was developed in the Visual LANSA IDE and requires Visual LANSA to work, is customizable by the customer. Customers that have already created applications in Visual LANSA can provide their users with structured access to those applications through Portalize.
It’s all about giving customers a jumpstart to building their own Web portals, says Tony Graham, a product marketing manager with LANSA, which was acquired by Idera in late 2018.
“All you have to do is plug in your Visual LANSA applications, because it’s built with Visual LANSA, and you have a functionally working portal,” he says. “We really give you everything you need to go.”
One of the compelling features in Portalize is an automated language translation function. According to Graham, the product not only assists with the translation, but then keeps track of users’ language preferences going forward, enabling users to automatically receive alerts in their language of choice.
“What’s nice about that is, when the administrator sends out an email, that email will come to the user in whatever language the user has selected,” Graham tells IT Jungle. “That’s all built on Visual LANSA.”
If customers want to add other functions to their portal, such as a calendar or a forum, they can build that functionality in Visual LANSA and add it to the portal. “The great thing about Portalize is it gives customers the understanding of what is possible within Visual LANSA,” he says.
Portalize applications are entirely customizable, and customers can add or subtract elements as needed. They can even pull up the source code driving the application behind the scenes to get a closer look at how things.
“They can bring up a page right within in Portalize. You don’t even have to go to the IDE to see how it all fits together,” Graham says. “You can’t tweak it inside Portalize. But what you can see is the code. It gives you all the references so you know exactly where you’re going to go.”
Portalize’s backstory bears similarity to how other LANSA products, such as its ERP system, came to be. “We saw a need,” Graham says. “We were building portals. We said, hey instead of recreating the wheel every time, let’s offer a package, a product that they can start with, so it saves them weeks or months of coding.”
Like LANSA’s open source ERP Framework, which features components like a general ledger, accounts receivable, and accounts payable, Portalize gets customers most of the where they want to go, making it easier for customers to get over the finish line themselves.
“We give you 80 percent of an ERP system, where just plug in your last little bit,” Graham says. “Portalize is the same way. We give you the options for a portal, and then you just plug in your last little bit of code. It’s a nice start for somebody if they don’t want to develop everything from scratch. You can buy a plug-in, and be up and running.”
Portalize requires Visual LANSA and runs on all Visual LANSA platforms, including IBM i and Windows.
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