New OpenLegacy Product Creates ‘Tech-Agnostic’ Services
November 17, 2021 Alex Woodie
OpenLegacy recently announced OpenLegacy Hub, or OL Hub, a new offering designed to help customers create technology agnostic digital services from existing legacy applications and infrastructure. The offering supports IBM i and z/OS assets, among other platforms that are commonly grouped under the “legacy” banner.
Since it appeared on the midrange scene back in 2015, OpenLegacy has been looking to help IBM i and mainframe customers extend their existing systems in new and profitable ways. Led by tech veterans from IBM and Software AG, the Israeli company created a development environment that could analyze legacy programs, such as 5250 applications, and generate new Web, mobile, and cloud interfaces from those assets using technologies like HTML5, JavaScript, and RESTful APIs.
The new OL Hub offering isn’t a rewrite so much as a repositioning of that initial approach, which the company refers to as its IDE (integrated development environment). The company touts OL Hub’s capability to create an “end-to-end API factory” for digital services, as opposed to the “one-off” services that it previously generated.
“The OL Hub like the IDE supports parsing legacy assets from an IBM i platform in the same way the IDE does, but makes it much easier,” OpenLegacy Chief Product Officer Zeev Avidan tells IT Jungle via email. “It still supports all the common languages and databases. The only thing the OL Hub doesn’t support is parsing IBM i screens,” which is supported in the IDE and which the company plans to add to OL Hub.
OL Hub simplifies the re-use and deployment of legacy assets using modern technology and platforms, OpenLegacy says.
The downstream technology targets that OpenLegacy supports has been upgraded with OL Hub. The software can expose business logic running on IBM i and other platforms as Node.js, C#, Java, and JSON using microservices and serverless techniques, and run it all in the cloud or on prem.
It’s all about helping companies shorten the time to market for the creation of new API-based digital services to meet changing business needs, according to OpenLegacy CEO Romi Stein.
“This enhanced flexibility [in OL Hub] simplifies the way API designers build services that reference monolithic legacy systems, and automates the representative creation and cataloging of previous interfaces with the ease of a cloud-native app,” Stein says in a press release.
OpenLegacy is also touting OL Hub’s command line interface (CLI) as a means to streamline deployment of business assets that have been repurposed with OL Hub, according to Avidan.
“The OL Hub’s CLI makes installation and automation much easier, whether you use the IDE or the OL Hub to generate the services,” he says. “But the OL HUB turns the parsed assets into language agnostic JSON modules. The OL Hub then takes the assets and can generate full, low or no code services.”
The low code and no-code options use a new graphical flow engine that is part of the OL Hub, Avidian says, while companies adopting the full code option can generate code directly inside the IDE. “These can be deployed either as microservices or serverless functions,” he continues. “The low-code option supports generation of projects in the Java, Node.JS, C# languages. We also are happy to discuss adding other languages as well.”
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