Databorough Helps System i Shops Maximize Legacy Investments

For more than 20 years, Databorough has provided documentation tools for the System i. When the company first entered the midrange market, the AS/400 had just come out, and developers were still adjusting to the powerful new box. Fourth generation programming language (4GL) tools, such as those offered by Synon, promised to reduce programming effort, development time, and costs, but there were no tools to help companies maintain legacy software at the same productivity levels. Databorough recognized this need and worked to provide a tool that could match the development productivity on legacy code that was enjoyed by 4GL developers, says Mark Tregear, Databorough’s founder and chairman.

Databorough has worked tirelessly to satisfy new needs as they have arisen in the System i community. There have been many changes over the years, the most striking one being the final acceptance and demand for Web browsers as a standard user interface on legacy applications, Tregear says. But despite these changes, some needs have stayed the same: As technology has advanced, application documentation, whether it be for normal System i development, e-business, re engineering, or support purposes, has become an even more important issue for System i shops.

The primary objective of documentation is to help those involved in System i development who are not currently familiar with an application to understand its design and logic so that when problems arise or enhancements need to be made, the sections of code that require modification can be located and understood quickly. Up-to-date documentation is critical if a company is to fully benefit from its legacy investments. Traditional documentation is static and soon becomes outdated as new enhancements are added to code. Databorough’s X-Analysis helps solve this problem by keeping documentation in step with whatever changes are made to the software. X-Analysis combines highly detailed cross-referencing with high-level analysis and documentation in a single product, making it the ideal tool for System i application design recovery, analysis, and documentation.

X-Analysis can help System i shops enhance productivity and understanding of an application environment. It’s a single Windows tool that lets users browse an application from a high-level model right down to individual lines of code. Some of the advantages of the tool include modeling, structured English source code views, application subdivision, static project document wizards, data analysis, and business rule logic analysis. X-Analysis can be used with equal benefit and enthusiasm by both highly technical System i programmers and by those with little or no programming knowledge, which distinguishes it from previous programmer-oriented tools and standard System i cross-referencing features.

Another important tool Databorough offers is X-Redo, which builds on the principal information gathered by X-Analysis to refactor legacy RPG into a Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture with View and Controller in Java and Model or business logic in RPG, Tregear says. X-Redo is the first tool in RPG history that has been able to automatically refactor large, complex, monolithic RPG programs in full.

Over the years, Databorough’s most important contribution to the System i community has been its ability to help companies capitalize on their legacy investments, Tregear says. Databorough’s tools let System i shops take full advantage of business logic by facilitating its analysis, extraction, and organization, and Databorough will continue to help System i shops maximize their investments in the current modern technology era and the future.