Databorough Products Overview

Developing tools services for analyzing and reengineering RPG applications for the last 20 years, has given Databorough a unique view of the very large and complex world of legacy applications running on system i.

Accurate and current information about an entire system can greatly improve the productivity of your IT staff, and reduce maintenance costs by eliminating the need to research, catalog and assemble the information manually for each service request, or modernization project.

X-Analysis is a suite of modules now fully integrated with WDSc/RDi and MyEclipseBlue, as well as running standalone on Eclipse without any other product dependencies. Individual modules are grouped together to provide useful solution sets that meet a number of requirements around a central theme. Details on these solution sets can be found here...

Extracting decades-worth of useful design information

X-Analysis builds a very detailed repository over an entire application. The repository maintains all information about application objects, their relationships and all necessary information to obtain detailed information from each object across the entire system. 20 years of ongoing development over thousands of AS/400/iSeries/System-i applications written in all variants of RPGII/400/IV, COBOL and CL, has produced an unmatched capability to extract everything about an application from object right down to individual variables. The repository is built automatically using a single command, and initially collects all object related information, but then parses every source member in the specified system and every source line mapping the contextual information of each variable in the system. A certain amount of logical abstraction processing that takes place while building the repository to account for some of the idiosyncrasies typical in an RPG application. This includes constructs such variable program calls, file overrides, prefixing and renaming in RPG. The repository thus represents a map of how the entire application functions down to individual variables.

Other more recent enhancements to this extraction process include being able to extract explicit data models and business rules from these ever evolving applications. This aspect of X-Analysis provides a unique advantage to all users by automatically producing this complete map, which otherwise might take years to produce manually.

Understanding Your Application: The Key to any Strategy

The precise information pertaining to the nature, metrics and design of a company’s mission critical business software, is an asset of enormous value. Without this information, maintenance and enhancement is generally not as efficient or effective as it could be, and the risk increases exponentially the more extreme the enhancement or change required.

In situations in which developers are not familiar with a system or its documentation is inadequate, the system’s source code becomes the only reliable source of information. Unfortunately, source code has much more detail than is needed to understand the system, and it disperses or obscures high-level constructs that would ease the system’s understanding. X-Analysis aids system understanding by identifying recurring program features, classifying the system modules based on their purpose and usage patterns, and analyzing dependencies across the modules.

Programmatic Re-Use of Application Design Constructs

The X-Analysis repository is a DB2/400 database which is well documented and normalized. For many years Databorough has provided tools such as X-Resize and services that use the repository to programmatically reengineer RPG and COBOL applications. This approach has been successfully used to solve problems such as Y2k, field expansion projects, database modernization, Euro conversion, Unicode conversion and application modernization. for more information on this contact info@databorough.com