X-2E Professional & Enterprise

Graphical Analysis, Documentation, Design Recovery & Migration to Java or C# for CA 2E (SYNON) Applications

Discovering & Documenting the CA 2E Model

Since its introduction in 1986 CA 2E has become the most successful 4GL tool on the AS/400 platform. The CA 2E (SYNON) development environment combines a rich and precise model of designs and specifications, with powerful code generation capabilities; something which has kept many companies IT departments competitive and productive for many years. Even with this strident history many companies are now facing real pressure to modernize their business applications beyond the scope and capability of what CA 2E can offer. The challenge is to move forward without discarding decades of investment in design, evolution and fine tuning stored in the CA 2E model.

Databorough has a long and rich history of building tools for SYNON applications as far back to the late 1990’s, when Databorough introduced a Y2K modernisation product for SYNON applications. Since then ongoing development guided by SYNON customers has helped evolve the Databorough’s tools to the point where the entire application specification can be mined, analysed and documented visually direct from the CA 2E model. This includes the data model, function definitions, action diagrams, and all internal aspects such as internal/external functions, condition values and messaging.

Modernization: Better by Design

SYNON was in many ways a precursor to the recognized standard in modern enterprise application development: Object Oriented (OO) and the Model View Controller (MVC) design pattern. The Data Model, Action Diagrams and Function Definitions are consistent with MVC, while internal functions such as RTVOBJ and RTVCND are explicit use of the OO concept. Unfortunately because of the limitations of the AS/400 and generated languages: RPG and COBOL, this value is completely lost in the generated code. No-one given the choice, would use the RPG or COBOL code generated out of CA 2E as an input to an application modernisation or platform migration strategy. The ratio between CA 2E and generated code is approximately 1:100. Even the cleanest conversion done this way would be a huge backwards step for a company used to the concise nature of developing with the CA 2E tooling.

A Modern Application in Java or C# with Flex or Silverlight

X-2E Enterprise completely disregards the generated code and uses the CA 2E model as a specification to generate an MVC web application using OO methods in Java, C#.Net or EGL. Flex UI is being introduced in three months time. The tool can be used against an entire system, user defined application areas, or individual functions as part of an ongoing modernisation effort. This provides more flexibility and control to the user, and helps reduce risk and overall cost, while maximising productivity with user driven automation.

Database modernisation also utilises the advanced design extraction directly from the CA 2E model, making use of long field names, constraint logic and all relevant database abstractions, either kept on IBM i or migrated onto other DBMS systems.

The code base generated from the extracted 2E Model is concise as per the mature and proven application CA 2E designs, and uses industry standard light frameworks such as Hibernate, Spring, nHibernate, as well as structured and consistent coding standards and practices for each language. The objective is to build a new application that inherits the decades of design investment that is editable, modern with distributed architecture.

X-2E Enterprise generates the sort of application that would have been written by hand by a professional application architect and team of coders, without the losing the essence of the original design or functional value. This is all done automatically, into the IDE’s of the language chosen by the user during generation. The new application is easier to enhance and maintain, and as such naturally attracts a wider more readily available resource pool for future development and maintenance.

Databorough provides services to assist or even carry out an application migration, and can provide customised enhancements to the tooling and code generation or refactoring to produce a standard that more precisely meets specific customer requirements.